[red_admiral]

Developing on cygwin, however, was a right pain. If a C library you wanted to use didn't have a pre-built cygwin version (understandable!) then you end up doing 'configure, make' on everything in the dependency tree, and from memory about two thirds of the time you had to edit something because it's not quite POSIX enough sometimes.

[smackeyacky]

Ha ha doing Unix like it was 1989. At the time I thought configure was the greatest of human achievements since I was distributing software amongst Sun machines of varying vintage and a Pyramid. I want to say good times but I prefer now ha ha

[jesuslop]

autotools felt old even in 90's

[chuckadams]

Autotools was designed to produce a configure script with zero dependencies other than the compiler toolchain itself. I always thought it would be a good way to bootstrap a system configuration database (like the kind X11 already had, the name I forget) but it turned out to be too convenient to just drop autotools into every project instead.

So now even today, compiling any GNU package means probing every last feature from scratch and spitting out obscenely rococo scripts and Makefiles tens of thousands of lines long. We can do better, and have, but damn are there a lot of active codebases out there that still haven't caught up.

[jasomill]

Reminds me of a fun weekend I spent ~5 years ago building the newest version of every GNU program I could get to build on NEXTSTEP 3.3 (running on 68k NeXT hardware) without major changes.