[geeks] What is going on with the open source community ...the stupid bastards are clueless

[der Mouse]

>> A starting to wonder why the Open Source developers are so enamoured
>> with the use of libtool, automake & autoconf.
> I like to call it "open sores" sometimes.

Preach it!

I feel the same way.  I *loathe* configure scripts.  Even when they
work they have problems (about which more later); when one gets
something wrong, it's hell to convince it it's wrong.  I've often ended
up applying patchtrees after running configure to fix up the mistakes
configure makes.

That's when I'm willing to run configure.  It's a security disaster
waiting to happen; configure scripts are unusually hard to sandbox,
incredibly tedious to eyeball, and substantially harder than most
programs to mechanically inspect, even for values of "inspect" that
amount to pointing a human at the places that might do bad things.
This adds up to "perfect trojaning targets".  (Some people say "so
don't run it as root" to which I reply "so you don't mind if random
people have non-root on your machine?".)

> [Lots] of good software of course, but most of it is crap.

Sturgeon's Law. :-~

> Unfinished, poorly designed, massively redundant with other projects,
> or politically crippled.

Aik.  That leads into my GPL rants, which I think I'll save for later
to avoid turning this message into a small book. :-/

> I've never ceased to be totally confused by autoconf/configure/blah
> whatever you call it, and I have books on it and have used it for
> years.

Okay, I don't feel so bad about my own reaction to it then. :)

> One reason it came about is because of the massive steaming mound of
> crap that so much software depends on these days.

Interesting you mention that.  I'm right now trying to get a piece of
software working.  It comes with configure scripts, but the design
looked good enough that I just constructed a config.h by hand and tried
it, and it was far easier than trying to verify configure's safety and
then bludgeon it into doing the right thing.  The reason it's relevant
in response to what you said here is that the principal reason I'm
having to hack on it is that it cokmes with two GUIs: one uses GTK and
the other uses lesstif/motif.  So I'm writing a _simple_ X interface,
one that doesn't depend on ugly bloated "steaming mound[s] of crap".

>> Also when you tell them they don4t use pointers in the right
>> way...they imsult you like you are a stupid bastard.  They jsut
>> write their code in a bad way and because it works for them with gcc
>> they think it works on every system.

Interesting you mention that. :)  The same piece of software has a
number of bugs, because someone didn't understand what NULL is, and,
more importantly, isn't.  I've started the process of getting in touch
with the right people to report these - but they are concealed for most
users because they use machines with certain common properties which
nevertheless are not promised by C (specifically, all nil pointers in
a varargs argument list are the same size and bit pattern as integer
zero at the same place in the same arglist).

> It's too bad we can't have another set of tools and compilers,
> maintained a little better, and without the political strings
> attached.

The only good thing I've found to say about GPLv3 is that it might
actually manage to provoke exactly that.

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