Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

It's also possible to use, say, pkg-config. Which can spit out cflags and ldflags and compilation flags without any autotools voodoo. There is no need to hardcode library paths, that is simply a strawman.

I wasn't defending autotools as such, but pointing out that the alternative in the wider world, beyond the group that the author berates and believes is responsible for the downfall of civilisation, is not another configuration tool but in fact nothing at all.

Of course there is no need to hard-code library paths, and of course you can use other tools instead, but the hard reality is that anything is a step up from the default, which is not to address deployment issues whatsoever. To say that such an observation is a "strawman" is laughable: I never claimed that there was a "need" for any such practice.

The fact is that the set of all people who can write code and the set of all people who know about software engineering practices to an acceptable degree do not fully intersect, and where they do intersect, people often choose to take an established tool instead of using another for a variety of reasons instead of making a choice purely on technical merit.