RE: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

This is my last post.  Skip it if you don't like it.


Bernd Jendrissek wrote:
>
> 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),

Consider what the American Civil Liberties Union is compared to the FSF.
The ACLU doesn't "move people to a preferred 'free speech' platform."  A
conservative criticism of leftist politics: leftists often wants freedom
of *their* speech, not other's.  The FSF is a political action
committee, not a guardian of free speech.

> 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.

I have no previous experience with GNU mailing lists.  I always perform
due dilligence reading archives about *technical* matters, but I don't
try to assess culture via archives.  That would be way too much reading.
Unlike searching for technical answers, you don't know what you'd be
looking for, or how long it would take you.

I *have* read the complete archive of the GNU Emacs / XEmacs schism.
That wasn't a GPL vs. non-GPL or UNIX vs. Windows cultural debate,
though.  It consumed an entire evening, it's not an exercise I'd perform
regularly.  I assumed the schism was tied to the personalities, goals,
and perceptions of the project leaders.  Clearly, parties didn't share
enough goals, but that's true of any schism.  No big insight in that.

I expressed surprise to a friend of mine about the degree of politics
espoused here.  He said, you're just not familiar with GNU mailing
lists.  Thanks for the education.  I don't know if I've educated any of
you, but hopefully I've planted seeds of change with some people.  I
think good engineering, technological progress, and undermining from
within are all more important goals than what you espouse here.

> 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.

You haven't a leg to stand on here.  The technical solutions *exist*.
You simply don't want them, because of your politics.  I can go package
them up for Autoconf right now.  Paul has implied that they will be
refused as "harming the GNU Project."  Your notion of inquiry as 'spam'
is authoritarian and intellectually dishonest.

> 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.

There is the Cathederal and the Bazaar.  A desire to avoid talking to
users about features, especially when they can trivially provide the
features, is strongly Cathederal.  Well, at least the GPL means never
having to say you're sorry!

> 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:

You can suggest, and I'll laugh at you as not living in the real world
of time constraints.  I performed *lots* of due dilligence before asking
any question here.  Months of it.  Lotsa Mingw to MSVC ports and
attempts to get underlying Autoconf tools to build natively.  The point
of talking to people is to save time.  It does not have to be symmetric;
I save other people time in other forums.  If your time is so godawful
expensive, don't participate in public mailing lists, let alone waste
your breath busting other people's chops about it.  All your
intellectual position really boils down to, is you want everyone to
communicate on your own terms.

Thinking of this, I find myself preferring Paul's uninformative
terseness.  At least it ends communication more quickly and spares
grief.  I'm surprised to find that this is better, as I didn't like his
responses.  But there it is.  So, I'm unsubscribing.  Thanks *VERY, VERY
MUCH* to those who gave me the very helpful answers!


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"Troll" - (n.) Anything you don't like.
Usage: "He's just a troll."