Re: Potentially Predatory Pre-Announcement of Possible Vaporware (zinq-djbdns-0.01)

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Laurent Bercot <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Two sentences:  "Ewww! Why?"
>> One sentence:  Why Not?
>
>  The burden of proof is always on the side of the one proposing a change.
> You took a Makefile that worked and was easy to modify, and turned it
> into an automatically generated configure script, which will automatically
> generate a Makefile, adding two or three layers of error-prone shell
> code, for a benefit that's not obvious at first sight.
>  So it's legitimate to ask you "Why?"
>  You may have very good reasons to do what you did, but "why not?" is
> not one of them. ;)

I want versions of ucspi-tcp/daemontools/djbdns/qmail that build and
install like any other piece of software.  I'm not really interested
in debating it endlessly, though.

>> I don't see how it adds a dependency.  At least not to the end user.
>
>  Let's see.
>
>  Autoconf-created scripts are usually full of bashisms. So it adds the
> following requirement: your /bin/sh must be damn close to /bin/bash.
>  Autoconf-created scripts use "head -1 foo" instead of "head -n 1 foo",
> so it adds a dependency to coreutils that understand the -1 form
> (which is not required by Single Unix).

Software that builds via Autoconf-generated makefiles is not all that
rare nowadays.  If you can't build my packages because of some
Autoconf incompatibility with your platform, you're not building much
else, either.

>  I could never tell autoconf-created configure scripts that my
> system was i386-linux with gcc *but* the diet libc, and not the glibc.
> autoconf makes it harder, not easier, for users of non-mainstream
> software (when it's supposed to help with portability in the first
> place).

Oddball configurations aren't at the top of my list to support.  I'd
be happy to take a patch to support them from somebody with the
appropriate Autoconf kung-fu, but that's not me.  Somehow, I suspect,
even if I had such a patch in hand, you still wouldn't be using my
packages.

>  It's your software and you can do whatever you want with it. But
> who's going to use it if you don't even satisfy the hardcore djbists? :P

My target audience is not the hardcore djb fanboys with their own
carefully managed patch collections.  I'm after the people who might
use djbware if they didn't need to track down and integrate a bunch of
patches to get the functionality they want or need.  I'm trying to
make the out-of-the-box experience better.  You could argue I could do
that without Autoconf.  I possibly could.  I'm not interested in doing
so.

I'm not going to be disappointed if I end up with 0 users besides
myself, though.  A big part of doing what I'm doing is that I want to
do this for myself, for a learning experience.