Re: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Bernd Jendrissek]

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[For those of you who insist on no meta-discussions, skip to the end.]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:26:08PM -0700, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
> > but that didn't work so I'll have to be more direct.  As the
> > most-active current Autoconf maintainer I can state fairly
> > authoritatively that this discussion is an unnecessary distraction
> > for me, and overall is a net minus for the GNU project.
> >
> > You're certainly free to work on an Autoconf variant under the terms
> > of the GPL, but the <address@hidden> mailing list is maintained by
> > and for GNU.  Please don't use it to hinder the GNU project.
> 
> Do I read you correctly that, presented with working patches, etc.,
> you would refuse them on political grounds?  If so, I'll take it under
> advisement as I make my plans.
> 
> Part of why I 'feel out' mailing lists like this is very exactly to
> flush the Gatekeepers into the open.  So that they say what they are
> or aren't going to do, and make clear their agenda.

You're being very good at selfishly minimizing your costs of doing what
you want to do.

OTOH, you're not being very good at winning friends.

The *reality* (you persistently claim to focus on that) is that the GNU
project *has* political goals, and your apparently apolitical world
view, of wanting applications to work better *at the expense of* the GNU
project's political goals (by reducing the incentives to move to a free
(speech) OS), is directly at odds with what I think is the emergent
culture of the autotools mailing lists.  Your wanting to convince us
that we should be "nicer" to Windows because it would suit you is as
mis-Carnegian (*) as is the suggestion that Microsoft "should" conform
to non-MS-de-facto or industry standards.

Also, your "feeling out" of this mailing list (at least you're honest
enough to admit it) is a very distasteful artifact of many a Windows
user/developer - it contains the presupposition that your time is worth
more than the *cumulative* effort spent by all here reading, replying or
deleting this thread.  It's spammer economics of sorts: it's cheap for
you to commit lots of people's energy to your cause, and the expected
value of the payoff for doing so makes it worthwhile for *you*.  But not
for anyone else.

I wonder if that's one reason so many projects have (informally) evolved
a policy of "show me the patches first; then we'll talk" - it just works
better for those projects than having the most productive maintainers
trapped in a quagmire of "feeling out", as if they're at the beck and
call of any prospective contributor.

Next time, before you feel the need to "feel out" any mailing list, may
I politely suggest that you crawl its inevitably online archive first?
That way, you find out:

 - who the "gatekeepers" are
 - how accepting they are of work that's politically un- or
   counterproductive
 - if anyone's done what you want before

(*) To make people do something, you have to make them *want* to do it
first.

> It is particularly pointless to "stop the talking, start the coding,
> and hand over the solution" like a good little open source heroic
> archetype, when some Gatekeeper is just going to shoot it down.

> I'm not even grousing so much about the FSF here.  In hindsight, if
> this is your position, I could have anticipated it.  I'm just thinking
> of all the open source people that have busted my ass for daring to
> assess the lay of the land before I begin coding.

Now that you've committed everyone's time and energy to a wild goose
chase, with apparently no payoff for doing so, I think it's time for you
to pony up and show us your patches.  Even if they're not accepted,
you'd still be able to use them yourself.

BTW I think you've done the maintainers of autoconf a disservice by
assuming they'd "just" shoot down a patch arbitrarily.

To close this message's implied self-referential content, here's how I
justify committing yet another marginal increment of list time to this
otherwise unwelcome thread:

 - The term "spammer economics" gets another hit on the search engines,
   hopefully raising general awareness of the problem.
 - Hopefully, another increment of public flamage convinces Brandon not
   to "feel out" another mailing list.
 - The autoconf maintainers get my personal 2-cent stamp of approval as
   "benevolent dictators" who don't "just" shoot down patches.

========

AFAICT you could have what you want by biting the bullet and installing
Cygwin, *minus the development libraries and headers*, just so that the
*tools* that ./configure expects, work: make, awk, sed and all those.
*Don't* install GCC or the binutils, *do* install cccl or whatever you
choose to use as your *n*x-to-Windows converter.  Then ./configure and
make and look at the pavement pizzas that MSVC leaves.

IIRC it's quite easy to install Cygwin sans development headers.

- -- 
One of the more troublesome things I find about Usenet, is it's filled
with people who don't see their own role in creating the negative
energy.
 - Brandon Van Every, in news:address@hidden
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