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This goes opposite of how I think of evolution. Admittedly, my feels are that we socially tend to overly emphasize the brutalist shades of Darwinianism, of nat
by jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This goes opposite of how I think of evolution.
Admittedly, my feels are that we socially tend to overly emphasize the brutalist shades of Darwinianism, of natural selection as a competitive pressure.
Evolution though is a much broader game of adaption, of finding niches. It's about capturing energy. And having diverse & creative means to adapt & succeed, less one finds oneself trapped only able to survive in a overly narrow environment. Evolutions greater story is more about over specialization being doom than it is about refining the exact perfect match; the perfect matches are amazing & elegant but rarely able to stick around.
I don't really know my stance here. But it does feel like a call for authority. Why are we still diverse? Why still have complexity? Can't someone free us of the diversity of options and crown a champion, decree how it will be? That sort of resembles Darwinianism on the small, but in the big, we get change & evolution from having non-static environments, from having many ways to shape and be shaped, all about.
That shift from dynamic to static systems, when evolution peaks, is usually not far from when that stasis turns to ossification & rot, decay & the fall. We probably should cleanup some & not support a million options, for our own sake, but this notion the past had of supporting a deeply rich & diverse technical ecosystem I find enormously beautiful.
Anyhow, I forget how often autoconf needs to be run. I think often many projects would work fine for aomg time using the same generated conf across many many builds? There's focus here on the silliness of re-running config again and again and again, but I'm not sure when technically it's required; it seems more like habit & ritual than a need?
- smackeyacky 3y agoIf you're building something really portable, you still need autoconf. Anything that has to run on a BSD or a Mac needs these tools. The article comes across as a bit of "blame the tools" where the tools aren't really at fault, it's the culture which has failed here. We seem to have never graduated from "wow it actually works" levels of Linux appreciation that isn't that different from the 1990s. Those distributions that most of us rely on (whether directly or indirectly) - Debian, RHEL - need to up their game somehow on vetting the packages they accept. We also need to stop just downloading .deb packages from the internet and installing them and preferring distros that look at security as a serious business including the packaging. Blaming autoconf is just silly. Sure it can be annoying, is mired in the past and perhaps seen as an anachronism now. But it's not to blame for supply chain attacks any more than a C compiler can be blamed for supply chain attacks.
- chubot 3y agoAnything that has to run on a BSD or a Mac needs these tools Do QEMU, tcc, and OCaml run on BSD and Mac? Pretty sure they do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39925033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39925033 https://github.com/lucasaiu/ocaml/blob/master/configure https://github.com/lucasaiu/ocaml/blob/master/configure They have hand-written configure scripts, and don't use autoconf. --- Also, https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ runs on BSD and Mac, and it doesn't use autoconf. The configure script is a few hundred lines of "boring" shell.
- senectus1 3y agoalso... what makes them think we stopped evolving? much like history, you don't actually notice it till after its done :-P