Re: [dev] [OFFTOPIC] Recommended meta-build system

Uriel wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:23 AM, pancake <pancake_AT_youterm.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 22:31:38 +0100
>> Uriel <lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:20 PM, pancake <pancake_AT_youterm.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> anonymous wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> Having said that, in case of rfork vice versa from FreeBSD.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, I am talking about FreeBSD. With configure you can make your
>>>>> program portable between FreeBSD and Linux. Most probably other
>>>>> systems won't implement clone/rfork their own way so program will be
>>>>> portable between all systems with some kind of rfork implementation.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> in that specific case i would prefer to use __FreeBSD__ ifdef instead of a
>>>> configure stage.
>>>>
>>> This is totally and completely RETARDED. #ifdefs are a disgrace and
>>> people that use them should be shot on sight.
>>>
>> if you deny ifdefs for minimal portability fixes and deny configure options
>> to specify OS or way to compile this program you are denying also portability
>> and incrementing the complexity in development and structuration.
>>
>
> This claim is patently ridiculous and wrong. As The Practice of
> Programming points out the only proper way to write portable code is
> to restrict yourself to the shared subset of interfaces available on
> all desired platforms, this certainly *reduces* complexity, and there
> are tons of software out there that use this approach and work just
> fine on pretty much any platform imaginable.
>
> Hell even dwm has no ifdefs or configuration step (or it didn't until
> stupid XINERAMA support was added).
>
> If due to the nature of the app one *really* needs to access
> system-specific APIs (this is much more rare than people claims to the
> point that I had trouble finding an example)) there are perfectly fine
> ways to do this without using a retarded configuration step or insane
> #ifdefs, for an example of how to do this see drawterm:
> http://code.swtch.com/drawterm/src/ (and yes, drawterm has a handful
> of ifdefs but most of them are either to comment out code or to enable
> some compiler specific pragmas, and the rest should be done away with
> and as far as I can tell were added by people that didn't quite know
> how to do things properly).
>
Congratulations for the first coherent-nontroll response :)

(Yeah! i did it!)

As read in drawterm's README:

---
To build on Unix, run CONF=unix make.
To build on Solaris using Sun cc, run CONF=sun make.
---
So.. there's a configure stage to define the kind of OS. which is in fact
a non-standard way to do it. which sucks because makes the developer
loss time by reading human-friendly texts to understand how to build it
instead of letting the system build it by itself.
--pancake