From: Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
bart writes:
> On 24/10/2025 18:35, David Brown wrote:
>> On 24/10/2025 15:27, bart wrote:
>>> On 24/10/2025 03:00, Keith Thompson wrote:
>>>> bart writes:
>>>>> On 24/10/2025 00:04, Keith Thompson wrote:
>>>>>> bart writes:
>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> I note that you've ignored the vast majority of my previous article.
>>>
>>> I've noted it, but chose not to reply. You have a point of view and
>>> attitude which I don't share.
>>>
>>> Mainly that you don't care how complicated a program for even a
>>> simple task is, and how laborious and OS-dependent its build
>>> process is, so long as it (eventually) works.
>>>
>>> That it favours your own OS, leaving users of other to have to jump
>>> through extra hoops, doesn't appear to bother you.
>>>
>> Why would someone care what how someone else writes their code, or
>> what it does, or what systems it runs on? They guy who wrote cdecl
>> gets to choose exactly how he wants to write it, and what systems it
>> supports. We others get it for free - we can use it if we like and
>> it if it suits our needs. But neither Keith nor anyone else paid
>> that guy to do the work, or contributed anything to the task, and we
>> have no right to judge what he choose to do, or how he choose to do
>> it.
>
> This a curious argument: it's free software so you don't care in the
> slightest how efficient it is or how user-friendly it might be to
> build?
Its efficiency is not a great concern. I've seen no perceptible delay
between issuing a command to cdecl and seeing the result. No, I don't
much care what it does behind the scenes. If I did care, I might look
through the sources and try to think of ways to improve it. But the
effort to do so would vastly exceed any time I might save running it.
The build and installation process for cdecl is very user-friendly. It
matches the process for thousands of other software packages that are
distributed in source. I can see that the process might be confusing if
you're not accustomed to it. If you *asked* rather than just
complaining, you might learn something.
The stripped executable occupies about 0.000008% of my hard drive.
> This is a program that reads lines of text from the terminal and
> translates them into another line of text. THAT needs thirty thousand
> lines of configure script?! And that's even before you start compiling
> the program itself.
The configure script is automatically generated from "configure.ac",
which is 343 lines, 241 lines if comments and blank lines are
deleted. I've never written a configure.ac file myself, but most
of it looks like boilerplate. It would probably be fairly easy
(with some experience) to create one by modifying an existing one
from another project.
> I'm thinking of making available some software that does even less,
> but wrap enough extra and POINTLESS levels complexity around that
> you'd need to lease time on a super-computer to build it. But the
> software is free so that makes it alright?
Free software still has to be usable. cdecl is usable for most of us.
[...]
> I was talking about all the stuff scrolling endlessly up to the screen
> for a minute and a half while running the configure script and then
> compiling the modules.
Why is that a problem? If you like, you can redirect the output of
"./configure" and "make" to a file, and take a look at the output later
if you need to (you probably won't).
[...]
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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