On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
Copyleft vs permissive license arguments get in the way of making good
technical decisions IMO - except when the distinction is needed for
NON-ideological arguments.
+1
Backwards compatibility has a couple of points to commend it:
* not alienating existing base in the hopes of pursuing a new base
* although it’s more work, the discipline involved CAN result in cleaner code
in the long run.
We have already cleaned up quite a lot of cruft. There is still much
more to do in that regard, regardless of the build system being used.
IMO if X.org dumped imake, that’s a good reason to think about doing
the same; HOWEVER, _if_ some of the platforms that the hardcore
copyleft advocates would ignore cannot reasonably support autotools,
then IMO that _is_ a reason to accept the complexity of dual build
systems. To those who think that code has some natural right to be
open source, backwards compatibility is merely a compromise with the
lack of that; but to those who simply want to USE something and leave
the ideology behind, it’s _necessary_. I’ve got Macs (Mac Mini 2007
and 2011) and Suns (the most modern being a T5240) at home, and while
from time to time I run a Linux VM on one of the Macs, it’s not what
I use on a daily basis, but simply something for re-creating
situations others might encounter.
Again, I do not mind dumping Imake eventually. But it's replacement
needs to actually exist, and work before we can consider that -- for
obvious reasons.
My immediate interest is getting CDE on OS X and Solaris 11. AFAIK,
both of those either have automake/autoconf from the vendor, or
have it in a reasonably well-supported packaging of free software
(e.g. MacPorts for OS X). So I would suppose porting to OS X
(Solaris 11 supposedly more or less works, although I gather SPARC
hasn’t been tried yet?) is if anything likelier with autotools than
without.
Probably not, but original CDE ran on sparc, so I don't see a huge
issue there. Mac on the otherhand -- I have no experience there.
[...]
--
Jon Trulson
"Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
--Abraham Lincoln
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