A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)
I must admit to being a bit puzzled as to what his point is.<p>Yeah, there are a lot of dependencies if you want to compile an entire linux distro from source. But it's just exposed because everything is right there. If you actually tried to figure out how to compile all the software on your <i>Windows machine</i>, would it be any better?<p>And to say that libtool, bloated and complex as it is, came about because someone was <i>incompetent</i> seems quite a bit insulting. It seems that confronted with a compatibility problem between different Unix-like systems, one has two choices:<p>(1) Coordinate changes to all Unix-like systems so the compatibility problem is removed, or<p>(2) Work around the problem with some sort of wrapper.<p>Now, in a perfect world, (1) is obviously the better alternative (but even that wouldn't help existing installations.) But the world is <i>not</i> perfect, and my chances of accomplishing (1) are practically zero, even if it's <i>"just a single flag to the ld(1) command"</i>. Hence, anyone who actually wants to get something working on all those systems would have to do whatever it takes.