From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 In-Reply-To: References: <46721ee70801311622y709a0d6cme651c10d7b749184@mail.gmail.com> <20080201085043.A5A898663@okapi.maths.tcd.ie> <46721ee70802010915o3309a4d2u3acb9d64eeb56611@mail.gmail.com> <46721ee70802012043h312ec790qa2dc2092169c8b1a@mail.gmail.com> <20080204011921.GD15093@nibiru.local> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v753) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: <1C4695F0-B1C3-455D-8C8B-8B58A246A0D4@pobox.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: David Arnold Subject: Re: [9fans] A newbie question... Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 21:23:43 -0500 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 461f3a16-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 03/02/2008, at 8:29 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > Autoconf is nothing but a stinking rotten corpse that lives only > because the cult of GNU adherents cannot (no, refuse to) grok the > concept of POSIX. the problem with POSIX is that it doesn't specify enough. for instance, if you have to write some code to list the network interfaces on a (*nix) machine, you have some that provide a specific function to do so (getifaddrs), some where you should use SIOCGIFCONF, another where SIOCGLIFCONF is better and one where your best bet is to hope the /proc filesystem is mounted and read from that. POSIX doesn't help for things like this. and autoconf, for all its failings, does. d