Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Jarkko Hietaniemi once stated: >> H.Merijn Brand wrote: >>> I just want a 64bit ethereal on HP-UX >>> >>> ethereal needs glib and gtk+ >>> those need pango and atk >>> >>> so far so good. Understandable and OK. >> No, it's not, since they are the first few steps in the descend to hell. >> Why the fuck it seems that to install anything I need to install a >> mountain of deeply interconnected and bloated libraries (yes, I am >> looking at you, gnome and kde), > > <sarcasm> > But ... but ... but ... I thought re-inventing the wheel was a *bad* > thing. And what's wrong with using a 10M library for one small routine if > it means I don't have to reimplement that one small routine? > </sarcasm>
Chopping the bloody libraries into smaller bits so that I don't have to spend a whole day trying to configure and compile humongous barfs that very obviously never ever were attempted outside some specific Linux distro. It's as if I went to the hardware store for nails and came back with enough bits to build my own fucking house. There is nothing wrong with having nice wheel libraries but with the current state of things I get the whole fucking monster truck fleet, with a marching band. >> and don't even get me started on trying >> to configure compile any of that stuff outside Linux. Just thinking >> about GNU configure and the GNU autotools make me see horrible violent >> visions through blood-red haze. Making software portable my ass. > > What I hate about GNU configure is that nothing is ever cached so every > package I do "./configure" has to run a bazillion tests to see what type of > compiler and header files I have---can't it just do that *once* when I > install the system? > > Sigh. Sigh and amen, brother. >>> But glib does not allow to be configured without NLS, hence requires gettext >>> and libintl, two of the most stupid extentions ever invented to make >>> software >>> portable. --disable-nls should be the default, and supported by every single >> On that I can agree. They are prime WTFWTT (What The Fuck Where They >> Thinking) software. > > Guess I'm lucky in not having to deal directly with that. What exactly, > *is* so bad about gettext and libintl? Or will I regret asking? You asking from the sysadmin viewpoint or from the developer viewpoint? I'll give you both for the same price! Sysadmin viewpoint: to get a piece of software installed you need to install gettext/libintl, EVEN IF YOU DON'T FOR THE MOMENT CARE FOR ANYTHING ELSE THAN THE BUILTIN/DEFAULT (English) language. If you don't have it in your system, you will have the fun of trying to compile it. Developer viewpoint: I haven't tried this for years, but from what I have gathered it still sucks by being (a) much too simplistic for larger or more complicated projects (b) not understanding Unicode well. It was probably fine for small projects back in the 80s but something better is needed for today. > -spc (Perhaps a better question is---why do you *need* a 64-bit ethereal?) I am no Merijn but I guess the issue is that he has hardware and OS on it that simply is 64 bits, and he needs to compile from scratch because nobody else has done that for him.
