[TUHS] "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[TUHS] "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 146 bytes --]

I know it's out there, I just can't find it.

It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion
to "going for baroque..."

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 228 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

ron minnich wrote in
 <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ@mail.gmail.com>:

 |I know it's out there, I just can't find it.

  Name:         xorg-imake
  Path:         /usr/ports/xorg
  Version:      1.0.10
  Release:      1
  Description:  imake build system
  URL:          http://xorg.freedesktop.org
  Maintainer:   CRUX Xorg Team, xorg-ports at crux dot nu
  Dependencies: xorg-cf-files,xorg-xorgproto

...

  name=xorg-imake
  version=1.0.10
  release=1
  source=(https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.xz)

  build() {
          cd imake-$version

          ./configure --prefix=/usr

          make
          make DESTDIR=$PKG install
  }

 |It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion
 |to "going for baroque..."

i hate it.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1334 bytes --]

Sorry, I'm looking for the paper, not imake itself :-)

I stopped typing
imake
many decades ago, and feel better for that fact.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:04 AM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> ron minnich wrote in
>  <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ@mail.gmail.com>:
>
>  |I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>
>   Name:         xorg-imake
>   Path:         /usr/ports/xorg
>   Version:      1.0.10
>   Release:      1
>   Description:  imake build system
>   URL:          http://xorg.freedesktop.org
>   Maintainer:   CRUX Xorg Team, xorg-ports at crux dot nu
>   Dependencies: xorg-cf-files,xorg-xorgproto
>
> ...
>
>   name=xorg-imake
>   version=1.0.10
>   release=1
>   source=(https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.xz
> )
>
>   build() {
>           cd imake-$version
>
>           ./configure --prefix=/usr
>
>           make
>           make DESTDIR=$PKG install
>   }
>
>  |It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion
>  |to "going for baroque..."
>
> i hate it.
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2213 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Henry Bent]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 453 bytes --]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2025 at 12:09, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>
> It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion
> to "going for baroque..."
>

I'm not finding anything with that phrase on the web or in Usenet except
for NetBSD's pkgsrc, whose official description of imake is "obsolete build
tool."  Do you have a paper with a specific reference to that title?

-Henry

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 866 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 716 bytes --]

I'm having a hard time finding the reference, and I wonder if it was maybe
in ;login:

"imake: An Obsolete Build Tool" by Paul W. Richards



On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:14 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Mar 2025 at 12:09, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>>
>> It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion
>> to "going for baroque..."
>>
>
> I'm not finding anything with that phrase on the web or in Usenet except
> for NetBSD's pkgsrc, whose official description of imake is "obsolete build
> tool."  Do you have a paper with a specific reference to that title?
>
> -Henry
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1704 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Alan Coopersmith via TUHS]

On 3/18/25 09:03, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> ron minnich wrote in
>   <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ@mail.gmail.com>:
> 
>   |I know it's out there, I just can't find it.

>    name=xorg-imake
>    version=1.0.10
>    release=1
>    source=(https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.xz)

Yes, we still maintain Imake upstream at X.Org, but every new release for years
has had notes like:

   The X Window System used imake extensively up through the X11R6.9 release,
   for both full builds within the source tree and external software.
   X moved off of imake for its build system in 2005 for X11R7.0 and later
   releases, but still provides imake for building existing external software
   programs that have not yet converted, though we are not actively maintaining
   it for new OS or platform releases.

   Anyone shipping software still using imake to build should be working on
   moving to something that is still adding support for new platforms and
   runtimes.

as seen in https://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2024-January/061524.html

We don't even use Imake to build itself - since 2005 it has been built with
autoconf & automake, and this year I merged the changes to let it build with
meson instead:
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/imake/-/merge_requests/13

But I don't have a copy of the paper referred to in the first email in this
thread, and both the sites we link to for Imake information from the Imake
README seem to have died now:

     https://www.snake.net/software/imake-stuff/
     https://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2505 bytes --]

https://archive.org/details/login_jan94/page/n31/mode/2up?q=imake

"I said, in a review I wrote for this newsletter that Software Portability
with imake [Paul DuBois, 1993. Software Portability with imake. O'Reilly &
Associ¬ ates, Inc.] is a fine book: well-written, well-edited, and useful.
Here, I'll argue that it's a fine book about a dreadful idea: imake.
Actually, I've seen enough imake-like make front-ends to suspect that such
things are as common as peas. I don't like any of them. Why?"



On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:21 AM Alan Coopersmith <
alan.coopersmith@oracle.com> wrote:

> On 3/18/25 09:03, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> > ron minnich wrote in
> >   <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ@mail.gmail.com>:
> >
> >   |I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>
> >    name=xorg-imake
> >    version=1.0.10
> >    release=1
> >    source=(
> https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.xz)
>
> Yes, we still maintain Imake upstream at X.Org, but every new release for
> years
> has had notes like:
>
>    The X Window System used imake extensively up through the X11R6.9
> release,
>    for both full builds within the source tree and external software.
>    X moved off of imake for its build system in 2005 for X11R7.0 and later
>    releases, but still provides imake for building existing external
> software
>    programs that have not yet converted, though we are not actively
> maintaining
>    it for new OS or platform releases.
>
>    Anyone shipping software still using imake to build should be working on
>    moving to something that is still adding support for new platforms and
>    runtimes.
>
> as seen in
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2024-January/061524.html
>
> We don't even use Imake to build itself - since 2005 it has been built with
> autoconf & automake, and this year I merged the changes to let it build
> with
> meson instead:
>     https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/imake/-/merge_requests/13
>
> But I don't have a copy of the paper referred to in the first email in this
> thread, and both the sites we link to for Imake information from the Imake
> README seem to have died now:
>
>      https://www.snake.net/software/imake-stuff/
>      https://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/
>
> --
>          -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
>           Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3959 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Alan Coopersmith via TUHS wrote in
 <95e2b2eb-4830-4fe1-9492-65bc53d3f297@oracle.com>:
 |On 3/18/25 09:03, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> ron minnich wrote in
 |>   <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ@mail.gmail.com>:
 |> 
 |>|I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
 |
 |>    name=xorg-imake
 |>    version=1.0.10
 |>    release=1
 |>    source=(https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.\
 |>    xz)
 |
 |Yes, we still maintain Imake upstream at X.Org, but every new release \
 |for years
 |has had notes like:
 ...
 |But I don't have a copy of the paper referred to in the first email in this
 |thread, and both the sites we link to for Imake information from the Imake
 |README seem to have died now:
 |
 |     https://www.snake.net/software/imake-stuff/
 |     https://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/

yes, the timeouts i also had from Germany.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Ronald Natalie]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 461 bytes --]

I make relies on having an independently callable C preprocessor that 
they make assumptions what the output from it look (which is not 
anything laid down by a standard or the like).    We used to use Imake 
extensively to build our code base, and tehre were platforms I had to 
bring along my own CPP because the one for the compiler didn’t work for 
the purpose (mostly issues with space and tab substitutions).    We 
eventually switched to CMAKE.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1473 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Al Kossow]

>   |     https://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/

https://web.archive.org/web/20011201063421/http://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/#other-info

but it's (obviously) mostly about the book

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Daria Phoebe Brashear]

Who's got old issues of login? Mine probably were lost when I moved
out of my ex's place.

J. S. Haemer.
Imake rhymes with mistake.
;login:, 19(1):32-3, Jan-Feb 1994.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>
> It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion to "going for baroque..."



-- 
Daria Phoebe Brashear
AuriStor, Inc
dariaphoebe.com

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Daria Phoebe Brashear]

Actually, here ya go:
https://archive.org/details/login_jan94

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Who's got old issues of login? Mine probably were lost when I moved
> out of my ex's place.
>
> J. S. Haemer.
> Imake rhymes with mistake.
> ;login:, 19(1):32-3, Jan-Feb 1994.
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
> >
> > It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion to "going for baroque..."
>
>
>
> --
> Daria Phoebe Brashear
> AuriStor, Inc
> dariaphoebe.com



-- 
Daria Phoebe Brashear
AuriStor, Inc
dariaphoebe.com

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1247 bytes --]

also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about
writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it uncompressed fine
but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.

gs on osx, evince on linux, ... nothing liked it.

Plan 9 ghostscript shows it just fine.

so if you get that old paper and have trouble viewing it, there is a fix.



On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:47 AM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Actually, here ya go:
> https://archive.org/details/login_jan94
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Who's got old issues of login? Mine probably were lost when I moved
> > out of my ex's place.
> >
> > J. S. Haemer.
> > Imake rhymes with mistake.
> > ;login:, 19(1):32-3, Jan-Feb 1994.
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
> > >
> > > It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice
> companion to "going for baroque..."
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Daria Phoebe Brashear
> > AuriStor, Inc
> > dariaphoebe.com
>
>
>
> --
> Daria Phoebe Brashear
> AuriStor, Inc
> dariaphoebe.com
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2204 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Daria Phoebe Brashear]

If you mean
https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/security/docs/usenix/usenix/winter88/x-helloworld.ps.gz
I ran ps2pdf on it (via homebrew) and it opened right up.



On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 1:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it uncompressed fine but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
>
> gs on osx, evince on linux, ... nothing liked it.
>
> Plan 9 ghostscript shows it just fine.
>
> so if you get that old paper and have trouble viewing it, there is a fix.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:47 AM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Actually, here ya go:
>> https://archive.org/details/login_jan94
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Who's got old issues of login? Mine probably were lost when I moved
>> > out of my ex's place.
>> >
>> > J. S. Haemer.
>> > Imake rhymes with mistake.
>> > ;login:, 19(1):32-3, Jan-Feb 1994.
>> >
>> > On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>> > >
>> > > It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice companion to "going for baroque..."
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Daria Phoebe Brashear
>> > AuriStor, Inc
>> > dariaphoebe.com
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Daria Phoebe Brashear
>> AuriStor, Inc
>> dariaphoebe.com



-- 
Daria Phoebe Brashear
AuriStor, Inc
dariaphoebe.com

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1955 bytes --]

you're right, that works fine, thanks.

no idea why apple preview won't just open .ps files any more, I thought
that used to work.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 10:19 AM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
wrote:

> If you mean
>
> https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/security/docs/usenix/usenix/winter88/x-helloworld.ps.gz
> I ran ps2pdf on it (via homebrew) and it opened right up.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 1:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about writing
> hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it uncompressed fine but
> almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
> >
> > gs on osx, evince on linux, ... nothing liked it.
> >
> > Plan 9 ghostscript shows it just fine.
> >
> > so if you get that old paper and have trouble viewing it, there is a fix.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:47 AM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Actually, here ya go:
> >> https://archive.org/details/login_jan94
> >>
> >> On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:44 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <
> shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > Who's got old issues of login? Mine probably were lost when I moved
> >> > out of my ex's place.
> >> >
> >> > J. S. Haemer.
> >> > Imake rhymes with mistake.
> >> > ;login:, 19(1):32-3, Jan-Feb 1994.
> >> >
> >> > On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
> >> > >
> >> > > It's also called the "imake rhymes with mistake" paper,  a nice
> companion to "going for baroque..."
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > --
> >> > Daria Phoebe Brashear
> >> > AuriStor, Inc
> >> > dariaphoebe.com
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Daria Phoebe Brashear
> >> AuriStor, Inc
> >> dariaphoebe.com
>
>
>
> --
> Daria Phoebe Brashear
> AuriStor, Inc
> dariaphoebe.com
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3436 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Clem Cole]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1261 bytes --]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 1:23 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> you're right, that works fine, thanks.
>
Yep - so does Acrobat if you have it.

>
> no idea why apple preview won't just open .ps files any more, I thought
> that used to work.
>
As Henry once so wisely observed: "*4.2BSD is just like UNIX, only
different.*"

DEC lived, and, I guess, eventually died, by "The Promise" - that old
things kept working on newer releases.  Be it VMS, Ultrix, Tru64 or
whatever.   Maybe not easily, maybe not fast, But they worked.  If you were
"inside" it, was very difficult to remove an old feature.  It may also be
that DEC and the like cared about the ISVs and the promise was for more
that the end user.   Modern systems (to be fair, even penguins) don't seem
to care as much about that idea. The license to "improve" something or
"deprecate" old behavior is based on a Greek hubris that was taught to many
over the years.  Apple and Microsoft often seem to have always had a few
extra helpings.  It seems silly to me, too.

BTW: ps2pdf is using ghostscript under the covers, so you should have been
able to call it directly.  In "brew" pstools kits which ps2df is part,
requires it and thus ensures it is installed.
ᐧ

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3527 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

On 3/18/25 1:04 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about 
> writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it uncompressed fine 
> but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.

I have a pdf of that paper.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Greg A. Woods]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1157 bytes --]

At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
>
>     We eventually switched
> to CMAKE.

Yikes.  That's not what I would call an improvement!

I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.

At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
basic form it could be highly performant.  It was simple tool for using
other tools in an innovative way.  As used by X11 though it was part of
what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.

CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
unpalatable dog's breakfast.  It also abuses other tools, requires hours
to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
nothing else.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP Digital Signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 195 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[G. Branden Robinson]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1213 bytes --]

At 2025-03-18T12:03:48-0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
> >
> >     We eventually switched to CMAKE.
> 
> Yikes.  That's not what I would call an improvement!
> 
> I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.
> 
> At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
> basic form it could be highly performant.  It was simple tool for using
> other tools in an innovative way.  As used by X11 though it was part of
> what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
> really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
> extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.
> 
> CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
> unpalatable dog's breakfast.  It also abuses other tools, requires hours
> to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
> nothing else.

I believe the usual rejoinder here is "worse is better".

My experiences with CMake are not happy ones.

Regards,
Branden

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, March 18th, 2025 at 12:03 PM, Greg A. Woods <woods@robohack.ca> wrote:

> At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald Natalie" ron@ronnatalie.com wrote:
> 
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
> 
> > We eventually switched
> > to CMAKE.
> 
> 
> Yikes. That's not what I would call an improvement!
> 
> I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.
> 
> At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
> basic form it could be highly performant. It was simple tool for using
> other tools in an innovative way. As used by X11 though it was part of
> what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
> really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
> extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.
> 
> CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
> unpalatable dog's breakfast. It also abuses other tools, requires hours
> to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
> nothing else.
> 
> --
> Greg A. Woods gwoods@acm.org
> 
> 
> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack woods@robohack.ca
> 
> Planix, Inc. woods@planix.com Avoncote Farms woods@avoncote.ca

CMake does seem to be losing some ground to the meson/ninja combination
these days.  I haven't used any of these beyond autotools, but the most
complex stuff I've built has only depended on Xlib and OpenGL.  I just keep an
LDFLAGS_<platform> up at the top of my makefiles these days and if I need to
target such platform, add $(LDFLAGS_<platform>) to my main LDFLAGS definition.
Same with CFLAGS and other such variables.  Maybe not tenable for a huge
sprawling project, but in my case, I'd much rather edit a line or two of a
Makefile at build time than maintain the whole added dependency of some
specialized build system.  Admittedly there are simple little projects I see
sometimes with something like autotools draped over the top and it feels like
a solution in want of a problem.  I put more effort into ensuring things like
pkg-config are happy than I would just adding -L/opt/lib to an LDFLAGS
variable...

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Greg A. Woods]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1499 bytes --]

To turn this around to a more positive direction....

Imake, and in particular the way it was used in X was of course a
product of its times -- it evolved in a world with much more limited
tools to build on, and in a world with far more variety in terms of
target systems to support.  As it was it did a remarkably good job of
configuring and building X11 for supported systems, and adding support
for a typical "modern" (at the time) Unix-like system was actually quite
easy.

If PMake (now called BSD Make) had been fully fledged a wee bit earlier
it could have done the job of Imake (as well as old make at the same
time of course, without the rickety help of cpp), and perhaps have even
allowed the creation of a somewhat more elegant set of macros to support
the full range of X11 and its target systems.  It would even have
allowed for parallel builds of what was at the time probably one of the
larger and more complex system components around.

Modern GNU Make has similar (though some of us would argue more limited
and less elegant) features that might have sufficed for X11, but it was
also too late to the game I think.

Today NetBSD supports a BSD Make build system for the full Xorg suite
including Xserver which works quite well, albeit only directly
supporting one target system in its current form.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP Digital Signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 195 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Ron Natalie]

I didn’t much care for it myself (and fortunately, it wasn’t my job to 
maintain the build production).   It at least gave us common tools for 
Windoze and UNIX.


------ Original Message ------
From "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
To tuhs@tuhs.org
Date 3/18/2025 3:09:09 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

>At 2025-03-18T12:03:48-0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>>  At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>  Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
>>  >
>>  >     We eventually switched to CMAKE.
>>
>>  Yikes.  That's not what I would call an improvement!
>>
>>  I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.
>>
>>  At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
>>  basic form it could be highly performant.  It was simple tool for using
>>  other tools in an innovative way.  As used by X11 though it was part of
>>  what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
>>  really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
>>  extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.
>>
>>  CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
>>  unpalatable dog's breakfast.  It also abuses other tools, requires hours
>>  to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
>>  nothing else.
>
>I believe the usual rejoinder here is "worse is better".
>
>My experiences with CMake are not happy ones.
>
>Regards,
>Branden

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Dave Horsfall]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 362 bytes --]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2025, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:

> > also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about 
> > writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it 
> > uncompressed fine but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
> 
> I have a pdf of that paper.

About five pages long, as I recall...

Pretty please?

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

On 3/18/25 4:05 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Mar 2025, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:
> 
>>> also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about
>>> writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it
>>> uncompressed fine but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
>>
>> I have a pdf of that paper.
> 
> About five pages long, as I recall...

14.

Rosenthal, D., “A Simple X11 Client Program,” USENIX Winter Conference 
Proceedings, pp. 229-242, Dallas, 1988

(the subtitle is "How hard can it really be to write "Hello, World"?").

https://archive.org/details/1988-proceedings-winter-tech-dallas

If you agree that's the one we're talking about, I'll send it to Warren.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1090 bytes --]

that's the one I have.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 1:41 PM Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 3/18/25 4:05 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Mar 2025, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:
> >
> >>> also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about
> >>> writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it
> >>> uncompressed fine but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
> >>
> >> I have a pdf of that paper.
> >
> > About five pages long, as I recall...
>
> 14.
>
> Rosenthal, D., “A Simple X11 Client Program,” USENIX Winter Conference
> Proceedings, pp. 229-242, Dallas, 1988
>
> (the subtitle is "How hard can it really be to write "Hello, World"?").
>
> https://archive.org/details/1988-proceedings-winter-tech-dallas
>
> If you agree that's the one we're talking about, I'll send it to Warren.
>
> Chet
>
> --
> ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
>                  ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
> Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1866 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, March 18th, 2025 at 1:40 PM, Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 3/18/25 4:05 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 18 Mar 2025, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:
> > 
> > > > also, related, I did find the original, wonderful, paper about
> > > > writing hello, world in x11: it was a compressed .ps; it
> > > > uncompressed fine but almost nothing I have could work with the .ps.
> > > 
> > > I have a pdf of that paper.
> > 
> > About five pages long, as I recall...
> 
> 
> 14.
> 
> Rosenthal, D., “A Simple X11 Client Program,” USENIX Winter Conference
> Proceedings, pp. 229-242, Dallas, 1988
> 
> (the subtitle is "How hard can it really be to write "Hello, World"?").
> 
> https://archive.org/details/1988-proceedings-winter-tech-dallas
> 
> If you agree that's the one we're talking about, I'll send it to Warren.
> 
> Chet
> 
> --
> `The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer` Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
> Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


One thing this article doesn't address in my mind is what precisely is a given
user trying to achieve with a "Hello, World" application.  On one hand is the
"Does my environment function" role in which I think their application may
have been a bit heavy handed for.  In my mind this would amount to:

- Retrieve the display
- Create a window in it
- Map the window
- Loop to allow it to display
- Unmap the window
- Cleanup

With looping to display in particular being based on some non-specific
termination that could be as simple as a timer/countdown.  After all, all I want
to know is can I build and run something targeting Xlib, all the rest is then
can I use specific feature of Xlib <xyz>, for instance, displaying text.  Even
polling for keyboard events to perhaps catch an Esc press isn't really relevant
to the question of will a window map, display in the event loop, then unmap
when the event loop is terminated.

On the other hand, a "Hello, World" is often used as the least common
denominator application that allows text-based feedback to a user, thereby
facilitating using that display mechanism for feedback throughout ongoing
development.  For instance, my minimal "Hello, World" for microcontrollers
tends to be just verifying I can drop a single character in the transmitter of
a UART and get that character back on the connected tty.  Once I have such
a putc, I have my first debug mechanism.

Not intended as critique either, just some philosophical questions that
arose thinking about "what do I want to achieve" regarding a classic
"Hello, World" program.

They do touch on this in the article too but I think there is a tad bit lost
comparing the Xlib implementation to the use of printf.  To quote:

> These examples demonstrate that programming
> applications using only the basic X library interface is
> even more difficult and unrewarding than programming
> UNIX applications using only the system call interface.

But some of the efficacy of this mention is lost without the comparison
being between "Hello, World" using nothing but syscalls.  For instance
all the matters of getting the graphics context correct, color space,
resizing, etc. sound like concerns comparable to those far removed
from a printf() user by the tty driver, things like ioctl(), etc.

Nice read though.  Obviously they touched on a philosophical question that
can continue to be kicked around in all sorts of ways.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[David Arnold]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 337 bytes --]

> On 19 Mar 2025, at 04:24, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> no idea why apple preview won't just open .ps files any more, I thought that used to work.

It did. 

Preview.app used to support PostScript (and Encapsulated PostScript) but it was dropped in Ventura.  

See https://support.apple.com/en-us/108775



d

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1140 bytes --]

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Daria Phoebe Brashear]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 8:49 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm having a hard time finding the reference, and I wonder if it was maybe in ;login:
>
> "imake: An Obsolete Build Tool" by Paul W. Richards
>

Which paper has this in its bibliography?



-- 
Daria Phoebe Brashear
AuriStor, Inc
dariaphoebe.com

[TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

On 3/18/25 5:12 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:

> One thing this article doesn't address in my mind is what precisely is a given
> user trying to achieve with a "Hello, World" application. 

I think it's a statement on complexity, some of it necessary, some not.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/