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You've just made his point: you're so used to living in the bazaar that it seems an inevitable fact of life. Through the lens of the Peter Principle, command i
by regularfry 12y ago
You've just made his point: you're so used to living in the bazaar that it seems an inevitable fact of life.
Through the lens of the Peter Principle, command is itself a competency. If you have sufficient authority, (1) is easy. His point is that unless you have someone with that authority, (2) is inevitable. People have risen to a position where they need the solution libtool provides, without the competency to force the right solution.
This wasn't always the case.
- lutorm 12y agoBut this is what I don't understand. When was there someone with authority to force all the Unices to adopt (1)? Autoconf came out in 1991, so clearly the problem existed at that point. That's coincidentally also the year Linux was first released, so it can't be blamed. It seems to me that Unix was never a cathedral. Each specific operating system may have been one, but they clearly weren't more compatible back in 1991 than a Protestant and a Catholic cathedral are, since someone felt the need to write autoconf. Please give me an example of this shining 20-th century "cathedral development", because I don't see one.
- xorcist 12y agoIn the essay, phk specifically mentions when AT&T decided to commercialize UNIX. Whether that makes sense or not is something I leave for the graybeards to fight out.