On 27/05/2015 16:49, Didier Kryn wrote:
I am slowly trying to assemble a minimal Linux development environment and the number of tools you need to just compile a C program is unbelievable. Clearly, the majority of developpers don't care about simplicity.
Amen to that. I built my home router by hand. A vital piece of software for a router is netfilter. It's very basic, very low-level, close to the kernel, and I just needed ONE command-line tool: nftables. I'm sorry to say that building netfilter by hand from scratch was the single most painful journey into crap dependencies that I've ever taken, and I've taken a few. I needed to install more software to actually BUILD the stuff than my whole router takes to RUN. Non-exhaustive list: autoconf, automake, bc, bison, curl, flex, gmp, libmnl, libnftnl, libnl, libtool, libuuid, m4, pkg-config, readline, sed, tar, xz, zlib. (Maybe some of these weren't used by nftables, but some other stuff such as hostapd. I don't remember. And yes, the busybox versions of commands such as sed, tar or xz were insufficient because they're called with long or non-POSIX options. GNU or GTFO.) I remember I managed to avoid installing Python to build libuuid - I drew the limit at Python, and would have given up if I had had to build that. But if you systematically disable every configure option that mentions Python in every piece of sh^H^Hsoftware you build, at some point you'll be able to progress without it. Ah well. I can't hate too much, my software requires GNU make 4.0 (which is 4 years old), and I still received complaints about it because people were trying to build it with GNU make 3.81 and failed. :) -- Laurent _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng