The joy of Unix.
I don't know which is more annoying. Either
- The GNU configure system, or
- The FreeBSD version of ports
Both of these started out as a brilliant idea, years ago. GNU configure used to be a nice simple way to set up your makefiles on some random system, but it has since warped into some sort of horrible byzantine thing that takes about twice as much time to run configure as it does to actually compile the resulting code. And a lot of that is because the stupid configure script spends approximately 45 years looking to see if esoteric routines like strcat exist on the target machine.
The FreeBSD ports system is also very nice when it works, but they keep fucking with the way the ports are made up, leading to stupid messages like
There is a COMMENTFILE in this port. COMMENTFILEs have been deprecated in favor of COMMENT variables. Please, rectify this.
when you try to build an esoteric port like, um, a mp3 encoder (and the bug isn't in the mp3 encoder, of course; it's down past three or four levels of gnu crapware that the port must have to compile.
At least the FreeBSD people haven't yet depreciated their packages collection, because there's actually a fighting chance of getting the toolset without having to chase around Robin Hoods barn thirty or forty times.
On the bright side, this is probably the encouragement I need to update mastodon to a 2.6 kernel.