On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Warren Young wrote:
Besides, why should BSD purity get to hold back the Autotools? If the distrowatch.com stats are to be believed, *BSD's market share is under 1% that of Linux, which itself is only about 1% of the overall market of machines the Autotools can reasonably be used on. Further reduce that by the percentage of BSD boxes that have not yet had gmake installed after installation; 10% maybe? We're probably talking about a set of boxes comprising < 0.001% of the market. (10% of 1% of 1%.)
I agree that there can be massive savings in effort if we only support the 99 percenters and only support one common OS running only on the common i686 platform. It should not matter that the 1% of developers who are developing under some OS other than GNU/Linux produce vastly more than 1% of the development innovations because they are still actively using source code and doing interesting development work on interesting hardware. At least 99% of GNU/Linux users (the 99 percenters) only use binary distributions and never look at source code so there is hardly any value to the source code being "free" any more and we should just tear up that manifesto and sign it all over to a nice big umbrella corporation who will agree to provide us with our binary distributions.
If we can just accept that GNU/Linux of a particular recent vintage (e.g. Ubuntu 10.10) is the approved target than most of the configure script tests can be removed and everything will be so much easier.
Bob P.S. I choose to be a 1 percenter. -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
