[geeks] What is going on with the open source community ...the stupid bastards are clueless

[der Mouse]

> [0] Something that's always bugged me about autoconf is that there
>      tend to be a great many checks it runs that could be batched
>      rather than its current mode of building a tiny test case,
>      running it through the compiler, and checking the result.
>      Why[1] check each library and symbol with an explicit link test?

Because it's really the only way to do it.

>      It'd be much saner to check them all at once through the
>      platform's interface to the dynamic linker (dlopen() or the
>      local equivalent),

That restricts you to running on platforms that *have* dynamic linkers,
even when building software that has no (other) dependency on dynamic
linking whatsoever.  And that's...well, "broken" doesn't seem too
strong, to me.

(Urg.  I jsut realized I'm actually defending configure scripts.  This
must be a nightmare...I gotta wake up...somehow...)

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