From owner-freebsd-current Mon Dec 8 12:48:53 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id MAA09609 for current-outgoing; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:48:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current) Received: from smtp01.primenet.com (smtp01.primenet.com [206.165.6.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA09593 for ; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:48:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp01.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA21881; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 07:21:22 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp01.primenet.com, id smtpd021777; Mon Dec 8 07:21:13 1997 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA14881; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 13:47:37 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199712082047.NAA14881@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Diffs to support RAIDframe on FreeBSD To: nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams) Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 20:47:37 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, karl@mcs.net, current@FreeBSD.ORG, Jim.Zelenka@cs.cmu.edu In-Reply-To: <199712080701.AAA10388@mt.sri.com> from "Nate Williams" at Dec 8, 97 00:01:57 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > 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.