On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 07:07:49AM +0000, David Tweed wrote:
> 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.
I think Uriel means that if you need mkstemp(), you should check if
mkstemp() is there (by trying to compile some code with mkstemp(), for
example), not what OS it is. Same with other features.
Received on Wed Jan 27 2010 - 12:12:06 UTC
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