Posts tagged programming computing software design review libtool unix posix bazaar ESR bsd cathedral configure

At the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, is libtool, which tries to hide the fact that there is no standardized way to build a shared library in Unix. Instead of standardizing how to do that across all Unixen—something that would take just a single flag to the ld(1) command […] the source code for devel/libtool weighs in at 414,740 lines. Half that line count is test cases, which in principle is commendable […] the tests elaborately explore the functionality of the complex solution for a problem that should not exist in the first place. Even more maddening is that 31,085 of those lines are in a single unreadably ugly shell script called configure. The idea is that the configure script performs approximately 200 automated tests, so that the user is not burdened with configuring libtool manually. This is a horribly bad idea […] It is a travesty that the configure idea survived.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257