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Date:      Mon, 8 Dec 1997 20:47:37 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams)
Cc:        tlambert@primenet.com, karl@mcs.net, current@FreeBSD.ORG, Jim.Zelenka@cs.cmu.edu
Subject:   Re: Diffs to support RAIDframe on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <199712082047.NAA14881@usr08.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <199712080701.AAA10388@mt.sri.com> from "Nate Williams" at Dec 8, 97 00:01:57 am

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> > Note that the use of Imake (the correct way to do cross-platform
> > configuration...
> 
> ROTFL.  You've *GOT* to be kidding, right?
> 
> Imake is one of those 'evil daemon spawned utilties from the pit of hell
> that should be killed with a wooden stake through the heart'.  I've seen
> many a good engineer who was given that line reduced to a babbling
> idiot that ended up giving up software engineering and took up much
> safer sports like kick-boxing and arena fighting. :)

And "configure" is another.  Only Imake doesn't depend on anything
but Imake, so at least you can generate VMS and DOS build files
with it without having to turn your DOS or VMS system into GNU.

Novell used Imake for cross-platform (AIX/UnixWare/Solaris/SunOS/Ultrix)
builds for the NetWare for UNIX product, with great success.

It just takes sitting down and understanding it, and writing a template
file for your own project.  The Imake X11 dependency in RAIDframe is
an artifact of the way it's used, not of Imake itself.

Imake is crap, but it's the best crap out there so far.  It has a much
better grasp of metasyntax than GNU configure pretends to...


> It's *MUCH* easier to build your own distributed 'make' program that
> does this than to use Imake with anything *signficantly* large.  Dinky X
> programs don't count, and since X doesn't compile on non-Unix platforms
> it doesn't count.

X *does* compile on non-UNIX platforms; it's XFree86 which does not.

As far as "rolling your own", yes, you can, at the expense of having
to "roll your own" each and every time.

Anyway, it was just an editorial comment; I noted that a "port" might
want to prebuild the Makefiles so it wasn't an issue (I'd like to see
you get any utility out of RAIDframe for a DOS or VMS system anyway,
since neither really has a cache).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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