David C. Rankin wrote:

[On FHS] So in the end, it failed to accomplish its intended purpose. Instead standardizing on names and locations, we invented GNU autoconf, libtool, etc.

While I, very long time ago, put this unnamed female nutcase in my KILL file, I have to call BS on this statement. autoconf and libtool were there long before FHS came up. They were made to care for the differences of *UNIX(tm) systems*, and not for those minor differences of Linux distributions that the current rage is about. You know, about the situation that HP-UX was so POSIX compliant that you couldn't compile anything on it except the most portable software, or Perl with its old pre-autoconf configure. Or about AIX having strange ideas what Unix means. Nowadays, with Linux dominating the Unix landscape, portability is heaven, the uninformed rantings of the female nutcase not withstanding. Anyone but me still remember Eunice? Nowadays, it isn't even mentioned in Wikipedia any more. Once, Perl's Configure congratulated if you didn't compile for it. Or anyone else here who still remembers how kind of a fresh air V7 was when we got it in the early 80s -- and the UNIX(tm) wars that followed? Minor quibbles about Fedora / openSUSE / Debian / Ubuntu differences are nothing compared to these times. For your reading pleasure, I dig out two quotes that I encountered in that context: --------- Drew Mills writes: : A contest to see who could write the most useful script that could : actually be used in the most languages *as is* [...] I've written some scripts that work in 582 different languages, all of them named sh. -------- Larry Wall in some Usenet posting. You have to read -------- his original 4.x Perl Configure script to know what he's -------- writing about. These sometimes-posed-here questions about -------- bash are LOL if you look at his scripts. The posting -------- was probably made around 1990, before autoconf appeared. -------- (And yes, I dearly remember it's occurence on the scene.) -------- CREATED=92/03/17 OPENED=92/03/27 CLOSED=92/07/06 ERROR DESCRIPTION: the function prototype for fchmod() in the include file /usr/include/sys/stat.h is incorrect. the first parameter should be a file descriptor (int) not a string (char *). LOCAL FIX: PROBLEM SUMMARY: our current update scheme doesn't allow us to update header files. therefore, we will not ship this change. PROBLEM CONCLUSION: changes will not be shipped. TEMPORARY FIX: customer can edit the file themselves. change the first parameter of the fchmod call to (int) instead of (char *). -------- from IBM support, about AIX. Shows why autoconf was -------- invented. From openSUSE you'll hear many things, but not -------- they are "not allowed to update files". (The ticket was -------- opened by me, while on gold support contract from IBM; -------- this is not hearsay.) Cheers, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org