Quoth Julian on Sat, Dec 26, 1998:
> As for exams - whilst I agree, it should be noted that for the most
> part we are answering papers that we've seen dozens of times before...
And forgot since. Apart from the fact that you keep several
configurations for several platforms on the disk, apart from the
fact that you don't have to wait until configure compiles and
runs tens of programs one after another, apart from the fact that
there can be lots of lines in "./configure --help" output and you
must remember which option to give what value on this platform,
apart from that all, Exim's Makefile is documented really well.
You won't be able to put all those lines in the configur help
output.
And I don't like Richard Stallman's phylosophy. He seems to
think that software must be free, and ultra-fast state-of-the-art
hardware already is free. Then, we get monstroicities like GNU
Emacs and "./configure", which burn your processor cycles like
it's the end of the world, and you won't ever need them again.
Interactive Perl-style Configure scripts are still better than
GNU configure, because they check things _before_ asking you
about them and giving you the defaults.
But current Exim Makefiles are better than all of them. They
just _know_ what the options for this OS are, and the finish
their job quickly and move over to do the real work.
Vadik.
--
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone.
--
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http://www.exim.org/ ***
