Re: [9fans] A newbie question...

[dave.l@mac.com]

On 3 Feb 2008, at 00:17, Robert William Fuller wrote:
> An alternative interpretation is that the facts are skewed by the
> Bell Labs reality distortion field.  The syllogism goes something
> like this:
>
> All things not made at Bell Labs are bad
> GNU is not made at Bell Labs
> Therefore, GNU is bad

Hello children.  Today's word is "ad hominem".  Can you say "ad
hominem"?

"We are the knights who say 'NIH'".  Not.

Nobody's mentioned the antecedents of autoconf&co.
other than genealogically.

The criticism has been (IMO) well-reasoned.

If the appraisals appear somewhat vituperative at times,
that is probably because the writers thereof constitute some of the
sorry
band of unfortunates (myself included) who have been persuaded by
circumstance
to engage in bootless battle with the autoconf hydra.

We eagerly await ingenious and novel counter-arguments explicating the
intrinsic intellectual beauty and universal utility of a so-called
portability system
consisting of 10K+SLOCs of convoluted, inscrutable and non-portable
configuration scripts
intertwined with a twisty maze of twisted #ifdefs.

DaveL