Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 23:55:39 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: Dom.Mitchell@palmerharvey.co.uk (Dominic Mitchell) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Configure considered Harmful Message-ID: <199907162355.QAA18238@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990716084229.A48601@palmerharvey.co.uk> from "Dominic Mitchell" at Jul 16, 99 08:42:29 am
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> > Even given the existance of the evil "configure" program I really > > doubt the Apache people aren't (very) wise to this. > > Evil configure program? > > I find gnu configure scripts to be a blessing, but I'm merely an > administrator... > > Please explain what is so awful about them. It's a program that abstracts platform specific things from the sight of the programmer. This has several things wrong with it: 1) It duplicates the effort that created Imake before configure ever existed. 2) It puts the knowledge about the platform in the script, instead of in the tool that does the generation (i.e. like Imake), which means that: a) it has a hard time recognizing new platforms b) you have to tell it about new platforms for each program, instead of once (i.e. as in "the one time you port Imake") 3) It put things out of the sight of the programmer, increasing the liklihood that the programmer will not take per-platform algorithmic abstraction into account in their design. 4) By way of #3, we are breeding a whole generation of performance tweaking ignorant programmers. 5) It generates Makefiles that do macro expansion of macros, so that the resulting Makefile required GNU make to run, instead of the standard make. 6) It, itself, has such a macro, and requires GNU make to build. 7) It put things out of the sight of the programmer (I know this is a repeat, but it's so horrible that it has to be said again). As always, your mileage may vary. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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