A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

But pretty much everyone is the same boat. NOBODY likes autotools, but until something comes along which is better and does the same job, we'll switch.

Don't underestimate the size and demands of the job though.

I just wanted to quickly point out that you have referred to Linux as "much more cathedral than...". Considering that Linux was the original motivation for "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", identified as "the Bazaar", I highly suspect that you are not using the terms in the same way the original essay intended.

Indeed, throughout this discussion it has become clear that you regard anything with a sense of design and some amount of quality control as a "Cathedral". If you want to discuss the benefits of design and quality control, that's a perfectly fine discussion to have, but it also seems to be completely orthogonal to the original discussion of cathedrals and bazaars, which was wholly focused on the development process.

In fact, I wonder if your arguments would be better focused on the concept of "craftsmanship" (or lack thereof) in programming...keeping in mind, of course, that both cathedral builders and bazaar artisans have historically had a notion of craftsmanship.

phk how dare you question autoconf, libtool and package collections. Simplicity? Are you kidding? Nothing is simple. Simlicity is HARD. You are a grumpy old man. Leave us kids alone, we're having fun.

End sarcasm.

I can compile my bloated BSD kernel loaded down with every available driver I'll never need in a fraction of the time it takes me to compile Firefox: that is, measured in _minutes_. On an underpowered computer it can take _days_ to compile Firefox with all its supposed dendencies. I say supposed because no one is really sure. It's too much work to check and really find out.

Anyway, negative coding has been outlawed. It's inconsiderate. Even if you found something that could be removed, you would sacrafice every ounce of your karma if you dared to remove it.

End more sarcasm.

The FreeBSD ports collection, like OpenBSD's or pkgsrc is black box.

Unfortunately, with that last line, I'm dead serious.

My solution to autoconf and libtool is to run make >log 2>log2 and then do some sed transformations on the logs to produce my own "compile script". Sometimes I even change libtool's script to make the "quiet" flag do what the "verbose" flag does, so it can't hide anything it's doing. I then save my "compile script" for the next time I need to compile the program on that type of system.

One of my todo projects is to analyse the sum total of *BSD patches, looking for patterns. One of my pet peeves is having to make patches just to compile a program on the each BSD. Silly little MI differences that totally defeat automation and require silly little patches even for the simplest of programs.

Anyway, you can't say that the youth has completely abandoned "traditions" from ye olde UNIX, no matter how much they seem to hate "old things". They stand by the old relics of autoconf and libtool year after year and even vigorously defend using them.

The reason they can't replace these crusty old things is because they refuse to put in the effort to learn how they work. If you want to build a better mousetrap, first you have to understand how the old ones work, and specifically how and where they could be improved.

> it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS always runs like crap on last year's hardware

Nothing against a good conspiracy theory, but if you truly think this is intentionally planned then this thought is a bit … dumb.

So a "cathedral" must be "coherent" to be a true Scotsman?

Coherency cannot be measured, and it's extremely subjective. The *nix world can be extremely coherent: for example, you'll always find libtool, whether you want it or not, and your '70s-like filesystem layout. Isn't that "coherent" with its history?

This is not true even of Android and iOS, the modern wonderchildren he cheers on: a quick look at the Android filesystem hierarchy will show its adherence to outdated conventions (etc?) and incoherent repetition (sys? system?), and I bet you'd find something similar in iOS. So there might be a "coherent vision" behind, but the practice is quite incoherent; and mind, we're talking about very basic OSs that delegate any but the most basic functionality to third party apps. I'm happy to bet that in 10 years, the Android codebase will be as shitty and crufty as any Unix.

The truth is that a cathedral, in phkamp's rant, is "software that can all fit in one's head". For all operating systems, we're well past the stage where a single genius architect could envision the totality of a massive cathedral, for a number of reasons (time, working culture, legacy tech etc). Clearly phkamp, being more intelligent than most, only just passed that threshold with the very latest FreeBSD release, and felt the urge to tell the world.