All hail open source®©™ software!
About 8 years ago, I reluctantly abandoned the elm mail reader due to the increasing amount of mime-infested mail I was receiving. All of the other mail clients I looked at sucked compared to elm, but the mutt client sucked least. So I downloaded it (version 0.95.4i) onto Pell and started using it on most of my machines without too many spasms of software loathing.
Time passed, and some of my servers were taken out of service and replaced with others, some using the original software installs and some being newly installed. I did a new install of FreeBSD 4.8 on my home file/dhcp/gateway server a couple of years ago when I collapsed my home network down from a trio of 150+watt Athlon servers to a 20 watt VIA-based server (I tried to install FreeBSD 6.2 on the thing, but the IDE drivers on FreeBSD 6.2 dumped core whenever they tried to talk to the installer CDs. 4.8 was fairly picky about the CD, but it didn’t dump core when I installed the OS onto the box) and ended up without a point-and-drooly mail reader.
And, of course, I had to upgrade some of the software on downbelow. Sendmail was discarded in favor of Postoffice, I replaced the standard ls program with one I’d written myself as part of Mastodon, and a few other programs were also swapped out in favor of the better software that I’ve written. Unfortunately, some of the FreeBSD maintenance scripts use command line
switches I don’t support, so my mailbox on downbelow fills up with complaints about
the (not supported yet) -Ac switch for mailq, a missing switch that’s used to detect
setuid for ls, and, probably, a couple of others. And if I don’t check regularly, the mailbox fills up with junk and it’s a real pain to wade through it with the Berkeley mailx reader.
So this morning, I said to myself “why don’t I just install mutt and be done with it?” And, after asking, I went online and downloaded the most recent version of the software from the mutt website. It’s huge compared to the older version I’m using on pell, but I went ahead and copied it over to downbelow, unpacked it, and ran the thrice-damned gnu configure program it comes with.
gnu configure did it’s usual round of checking for about 100,000 things that don’t matter, whined (actually, gcc) whined about various gnuisms that aren’t supported in ANSI C, and finally spat out a bunch of makefiles. Okay, time to run make and, oh look, there are errors rolling forth like vomit from a cat.
Mutt 0.95.4i, on the other hand, compiled without complaint.
It might be difficult to set up an Alpha box to run Digital Unix these days, but it’s not even slightly difficult to install an old version of FreeBSD onto an old PC, or even in a virtual machine running on your bleeding edge Linux®©™ development machine (that is if you’re actually interested in writing portable software instead of trapping your userbase into some Open Source®©™ tarpit that requires that you run the latest version of some Linux®©™ distribution (or MacOS) to even have a fighting chance of building the effing software, let alone use it?) Why even bother to use the (stupid!) gnu configure program if you’re not even willing to make your code actually work?