On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote:
Maybe the landscape has changed for you, but not necessarily for
everyone. Installing "coreutils" could be quite a burden and the
tools might conflict with the OS-provided equivalents.
I'm not a strong enough believer in the Copenhagen school to think that
I'm in a different universe. I'll agree that the distribution of OSs is
different for each open source project. But - data needed - for either
of us to reason effectively on this. As far as conflicting, there are
multiple well established places to install things that won't
conflict: /opt /usr/local ~/local - plus you can just make one up and
put it in your path.
There are really only two approaches which work. One is the
"portable" approach taken now. The other is to require installation
of a full GNU toolset and radically simplify Autoconf, Automake, and
Libtool so they only need to work with this toolset. Installing
coreutils is a substantial step toward installing a full GNU toolset.
Thats the key number - the amount of benefit that install-sh gives you.
This violates a core principle of GNU in that "benefits" should be for
the benefit of the recipients of the software rather than for the for
the developers of it. GNU is a communistic/Marxist type model rather
than a capitalistic model. In the old days, the benefits were for the
developers and the users had to muddle through a difficult procedure
for every package that they installed.
To be sure, I will be quite supportive of a build framework if it is
based on a small package which is easily installed, and the build no
longer needs to be cobbled together with a mismash of Unix utilities.
Of course this build environment needs to be self-contained, well
supported, and would probably take five or seven years to fully
develop. There have been a number of independent attempts in this
direction but it seems that none has come close to the popularity of
autotools.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
