GNU is a POSIX shop

[Joseph Bruni]

Man, I wish all OSS was that way. I am so sick of trying out some piece 
of OSS just to find that I need to set up my system exactly the way the 
author does, with every little library dependency. It's almost as bad 
as DLL hell in Windows!

Then, once I get it finally compiling (running?), I now have a nearly 
unique configuration so removed from the distribution that I need to 
back it up for replication. Can I put something else on that system? 
Not likely. I'm right back to the one-app-per-box situation so common 
in the Windoze world. I think the concept that evades the authors of 
most OSS is that of self-containment.

I just about went into orbit when I found a new utility that uses 
Linux-specific kernel calls and required a "compatibility" library in 
order to work on FreeBSD. Did his autoconf script find my installation 
of OpenSSL? Nope! Because he put his into what he considers a better 
place and I'll be damned if I could get his autoconf script to find it. 
Would his autoconf script let me get away with --without-openssl? Nope. 
It still failed trying to find something I said didn't exist.

"rm -rf" was my best friend this week...


That is why I appreciate so much how well GPG works on every system 
I've tried with no external dependencies. It just works.

Whew. Okay, I'm done venting. It's been a long trying week fighting 
with some OSS written by some bozos who just don't "get it".


On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 02:39  AM, Werner Koch wrote:

> Yep.  GNU is a POSIX shop.