[rescue] GNU != Unix (was: PC v. PeeCees? (was: IBM hard

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> Ick.  I'm just glad that autoconf replaced imake.  Now there was a truly
> brain-damaged piece of utility software.

I guess I never learned it's internals, but it seemed to me that
it was never implemented properly...  It seemed all vendors shipped
with broken imake configurations, and even if they came close, the
moment you started changing stuff, it broke.

Compile you own X11, broken.
Use gcc instead of vendor (not-)supplied compiler, broken.

On and on...  I was very happy the first time I saw autoconf,
because the systems I worked on had a good 25% of their libraries
replaced, so something saying "oh, it's ULTRIX" didn't work.

> > Now we all get cranky if autoconf doesn't work exactly 100%
> > right.  And we complain about the quality of the authors.

> Well, a lot of the code -is- crap.  A lot of it is inconsistent, uses
[...]

> Now, before I hear "but, what do you expect for free?"...

> I would -never- release code like that to the general public unless said
> code is written for (and, thus, owned by) someone else, and that someone
> else demands it to be released at a particular stage, regardless of its
> status.

At the same time, a lot of really "good" programmers do some dirty
things as a quick hack, meaning to go back later after it works...
If all of that code was not released until they got back to it, we'd
have a lot less good software.  Sure, those ugly parts are horrendous,
but particularly with free stuff, the ugly parts can be fixed by
someone WITH time.

And some people just don't know better...  I think THOSE people are
the ones we need to target... or get the "good" people to always
label their ugly code with appropriate comments (which are often
near offensive code)...

--Kurt