From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:23:38 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Gnu/Stallman (was Bugs in V6 'dcheck') In-Reply-To: <20140602044348.GJ18282@mercury.ccil.org> References: <201406020209.s5229Q5o006174@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> <00668C2D-BF21-44EA-A7D8-A9530CA24551@bsdimp.com> <20140602031715.GA27136@eureka.lemis.com> <20140602044348.GJ18282@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <201406020623.s526Nctu017760@freefriends.org> John Cowan wrote: > Indeed. I rather like the Chicken Scheme approach: there is a Makefile > fragment for each supported architecture, currently BSD, Solaris, Android, > AIX, Haiku, iOS, MinGW with or without MSYS, Cygwin, Hurd, MacOSX, > and Linux. If you want anything else, provide your own Makefile fragment. This is only possible because of the standardization efforts at the C and POSIX levels. Remember that Autoconf/Automake were invented to solve the issue of all the forks: SunOS / Solaris / HP-UX / Ultrix / MIPS / Pryamid / DG-UX / ad nauseum. Lots of things that were almost but not quite entirely like V7 or System V Unix. Today many of those players are no longer around, AND standardization of header files and libraries means that C code is *more* portable than it was in 1992. So there's less need for those tools *now*, but that doesn't mean they didn't solve a real problem when they first came along. I'll agree on most of the GNU complaints (and I'm a GNU developer...); the original Unix "Small Is Beautiful" baby has been thrown out along with the proprietary licensing bath water. Sigh. (Boy, was that a great use for an old cliche, or what? :-) Thanks, Arnold