unfortunately, this does makes sense.

while the code for autoconf has ballooned, it's support for non linux
systems has decreased.  i believe the folk who maintain it envision it
as a way to support a vast matrix of packages, each trying to use the
very most bleeding edge features of the others on linux.

this is often gratitous, and feeds on itself.  but there aren't many
services (e.g. 9660fs) in linux -- everything's a .so.

i've attached a dependency graph of mplayer on gentoo.  it's 160 lines.

- erik

On Wed Apr 26 11:40:44 CDT 2006, micah@stetsonnet.org wrote:
> > http://udrepper.livejournal.com/7326.html:
> >     The only OSes supported in the [glibc] tree are Linux and to some
> > extend Hurd.
> >     ...
> >     For my new projects the razor is even sharper. Only Linux is supported...
>
> The part I find funny is that he calls everybody who doesn't like
> autoconf a "winer" (am I a winner, a whiner, or a wiener? there's a
> critical letter missing here) because it makes portability "quite
> easy" and then proceeds to rant about how maintaining portable code is
> too heavy a load for his projects to bear.  So it's too hard, but only
> winners think he's doing it wrong?
>
> Micah