Subject: Re: Where does the Latest Version Work? Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 01:59:56AM -0700 Quoting Henry B (Hank) Hotz, CISSP (hbh...@oxy.edu): > > If it’s actually something missing, you could argue that it’s a (very > serious!) autotools problem. In the real world, if you ever expect anyone to > use a GIT snapshot and try out Heimdal, I think some useful error message is > required. I haven’t decided if I blame the autotools packages for not having > sufficient prerequisites, yet. > > <curmudgeon> Autotools have grown to the point where they are a bigger > problem than the one they are supposed to solve. I think my recent experience > suggests they are a significant source of fragility. New projects should > think twice before using them. </curmudgeon> > > Excuse my grumpiness.
I will argue that grumpiness like this is a completely sane reaction to Autotools problems. I was trying to build master on old Solaris with GNU tools (including the Autotool sh^Huite) that were not exactly new. I was drawn into a seriously deep Jules Verne -style rathole of circular dependencies; and gave up about when a new libtool was needed to build a new libtool. Because libtool and its brethren in the Auto* club were too new to work with the current libtool. And building libtool would not work without libtool. No, this is not a Heimdal problem, /per se/, but if the toolsuite intended to facilitate builds on various divergent POSIXly hw/sw combinations is not in itself reasonably easy to bootstrap, there is something of a chicken-and-egg problem that makes it necessary to be _very_ careful with depending on too new releases of these tools if one is going to benefit from these tools in a software package like Heimdal. Also, the autotool maintainers would benefit a lot from actually publishing a high-level bootstrapping guide. </rant> -- Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina MN-1334-RIPE +46 705 989668 Where's th' DAFFY DUCK EXHIBIT??
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