From: already5chosen@yahoo.com
On Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:20:45 -0700
Keith Thompson wrote:
> 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'd say that it is not sufficiently usable for most of us to actually
use it.
> > 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).
>
> [...]
>
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
