The worst error message in history belongs to... BIND9!

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of
> perryh at pluto.rain.com
> Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 7:34 PM
> To: freebsd at celestial.com
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: The worst error message in history belongs to... BIND9!
> 
> 
> > >> This is actually just the difference between sh and bash ...
> > >
> > >differences in, say, arithmetic handling and loops can sometimes
> > >mean rewriting parts of shell scripts depending on whether it is
> > >going to run in BSD or Linux.
> >
> > That's a major argument for doing things in python or perl as
> > they are consistent across all platforms ...
> 
> If one is going to require the installation of something that may
> not be part of a base system, that something might as well be bash :)

Except that bash requires all the icky GNU utilities to build so you
have to GNUify your system.  The second you put in gmake, gmake requires
iconv, readline and all the other nasty libraries, and from that point
on if you build something you never know if it's going to link in to
one of those libraries.

Lots of programs use configure and if they don't see the gnu libraries they
will use the more traditional bsd ones, but if they see the gnu stuff they
will silently use it.  For example, one I see a lot is programs using
gdbm if they see it, and if they don't they will use ndbm.

This can cause major problems for commercial users.

I'd love for someone to modify the gmake port to have a variable
you can set that would build all the GNUified dependency libraries,
build and install gmake and statically link in all it's GNUified
libraries, then remove all the GNUified libraries.

Ted