To me, this rage is misdirected. The instinct to take a repetitive pattern and replace it a higher-level abstraction is a good one. It is only because we do t

To me, this rage is misdirected. The instinct to take a repetitive pattern and replace it a higher-level abstraction is a good one. It is only because we do this that software is comprehensible at all. If a person's attempt at doing this leads to terrible problems in practice, problems that have nothing to do with the difficulty of the problem itself but rather with configuration or peculiarities of the implementation, then that is a sign that your entire system is built on a mountain of sand. His conclusion is that "pkg.m4 is a poison that is holding us back." No. The poison is a pile of m4, shell, and autotools that are held together with bubble gum and chicken wire.