From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: henry.r.bent@gmail.com (Henry Bent) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:18:15 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ] In-Reply-To: References: <201709121535.v8CFZOuB015695@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <20170913022333.GD24549@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 13 September 2017 at 20:53, Nemo wrote: > On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy wrote (in part): > > And it worked. Back at that time every open source (or closed source but > > sent around) project had makefiles that "just worked" on Sun machines. > > MIPS? Well that's IRIX, yeah, you need to do this or that. On a Sun? > > It just worked. > > Oh, I nearly wept when I read this. Building a typical project > nowadays is so painful -- the makefile works on one particular Linux > distro and woe betide the rest. > > N. > Henry Spencer's final commandment, as preserved at https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html , seems particularly apt here. Even now, in the days of configure scripts and their ilk, if your code blindly assumes that a "common" function will be present then it is destined to fail somewhere. -Henry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: