Re: Where does the Latest Version Work?

Måns Nilsson <[email protected]> Fri, 12 Aug 2016 12:54:33 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.encryption.kerberos.heimdal.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Where does the Latest Version Work? Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 01:59:56AM -0700 Quoting Henry B (Hank) Hotz, CISSP ([email protected]):
> 
> 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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