2010/1/27 David Tweed <david.tweed_AT_gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Uriel <lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why the fucking hell should the fucking build tool know shit about the
>> OS it is running on?!?!?!
>>
>> If you need to do OS guessing, that is a clear sign that you are doing
>> things *wrong* 99% of the time.
>
> [In what follows by "OS" I mean kernel plus userspace libraries that
> provide a higher level interface to the hardware than runs in the
> kernel.]
>
> It would be great if "conceptual interfaces" that are a decade or more
> old were universally standardised (so you don't have to worry about
> whether mkstemp() is provided, etc) so that a lot of the configuration
> processing could go away, and maybe that's the situation for most
> "text and filesystem applications". But there are and are will be in
> the future new interfaces that haven't solidified into a common form
> yet, eg, webcam access, haptic input devices, accelerometers/GPS,
> cloud computing APIs, etc, for which figuring out what is provided
> will still necessary in meta-build/configuration systems for years to
> come for any software that will be widely distributed.
In my observation one should stick to one platform, which is nowadays
Linux+common libraries (most of the time) when packaging some source
code. In >90% of all cases it will work fine, because the other 95% of
users use Linux as well and the 5% remainder either uses some BSD
where the likelihood is high that it'll just compile as well and some
<<1% users will use some exotic platform where we shouldn't bother at
all if it'll work or not.
And if there is a problem, some user will report it and one can think
of a change case by case. I applied this to most of the projects I'm
working on (also commercial ones) and it works fine. I don't want to
count the time I saved in not running configure ;)
Cheers,
Anselm
Received on Wed Jan 27 2010 - 07:43:22 UTC
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