[TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

[Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>]

On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 9:45 AM Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
<lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
>
> > This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf,
> > once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created,
> > makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in
> > the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the
> > world.
>
> This is outright claptrap and nonsense.  In the latter half of the
> 90s I was responsible for writing installers and generating
> platform-native packages for about a dozen different commercial
> UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF, BSD/OS, ...).  Each
> of these package systems was as different as could be from the
> others.  (HP/UX didn't even have one.)

Strong language for something that is easily measured by looking at a
contemporary package collection.  That's great for you and whatever
this was but it is a simple fact that autoconf is the most common tool
for Linux and rejecting it or something like cmake that has widespread
adoption makes life more difficult for distributions.  Go look at a
random deb or rpm spec or ebuild or apk or whatever you wish, these
all have inbox support for autoconf and have to impedance mismatch
your clever custom jobs.

> That entire process was driven by not very many lines of make
> recipes, with the assistance of some awk glue that read a template
> file from which it generated the native packages.  And these were
> not trivial software distributions.  We were shipping complex IMAP,
> X.400 and X.500 servers, along with a couple of MTAs.  Our installers
> didn't just dump the files onto the system and point you at a README;
> we coded a lot of the site setup into the installers, so the end
> user mostly just had to edit a single config file to finish up.

The set of people that interact with make is minimal in relation to
the userbase of contemporary unix.  Binary distribution is the norm
and has been for decades.

> --lyndon