[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]
Re: gEDA-user: On the nitty-gritty of user-experienced problems
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Hi!
Am 15.01.2005 um 00:55 schrieb Dave McGuire:
I think it's high time we tell the world's pimply-faced Linux
developer about this Linux Standards Base. From the software floating
around these days, it's painfully obvious to me that very few of them
have ever heard of it.
Linux Standard Base does not help much in writing software, that is
intended to not only run in Linux boxes but also on Solaris, AIX,
Ultrix, BSD, DG-UX, ... We would need a Portable Software Standard
Base.
IMHO the real problem is not tke lack of standards but the unability to
cope with it. UNIX had a long tradition in being inhomogenous. Open
Source programs written for UNIX were usually developed and used on a
wide variety of different systems having a wider variety of different
configurations. Portability issues were soon discovered.
Linux (and especially major Linux distributions) radically changes
this. Today the vast majority od users and developers use Linux based
systems, often having very simmilar configurations. Dependencies on
details easily creep into the projects and often are unnoticed for quit
some time.
In early UNIX days coping with the inhomogenous environment was easy:
Vi Makefile
Today, where everybody uses configure to create Makefiles, it is more
important than ever before, that configure is rock solid.
Unfortunately, the opposite is true: Configure tests fail IMHO far too
often, not because the installation is broken, but because the sample
compilees by configure are broken. Especially compiler and linker flags
often are guessed wrong.
But, if the systems get more and more uniform, configure becomes more
and more useless. In fact, the 'vi Makefile' approach could be
aproprate again, some day.
73, Mario
- --
Mario Klebsch mario@xxxxxxxxxx
PGP-Key available at http://www.klebsch.de/public.key
Fingerprint DSS: EE7C DBCC D9C8 5DC1 D4DB 1483 30CE 9FB2 A047 9CE0
Diffie-Hellman: D447 4ED6 8A10 2C65 C5E5 8B98 9464 53FF 9382 F518
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
iD8DBQFB6VREMM6fsqBHnOARAlI8AJ4yHfSRse/ruv8syCuAnHk0FRD2wgCfWUwm
19q0ooZ3ISe/KC4n/7sUN+w=
=dT+7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----