AutoConf and M4 bliss
Just wanted to make a statement that the CLI tooling for building software in linux (and really any *nix) has changed dramatically. In my mind, configure and make were all black boxes and it was very very hard to actually effect them as an independent developer once they were baked.
This is not the case anymore. I was able, with autoconf, automake, and m4 templates (and of course some C++ glue) to actually integrate two libraries (zfs and snappy-c) that know nothing about each other. This is a testament not just to the auto tooling, but the level of maturity of a lot of open source software out there. While make is still technically a black box (yes, make scripts are simple in concept, fine...but go look at Illumos makefiles and we'll talk...), it may be ok for make to stay in the shadows...like some x86 assembly that gets generated on the fly...
I just might, after this zfsonlinux + snappy release, revisit illumos. But from what I recall of the original opensolaris documentation (which illumos referenced early on), you edit Makefiles directly, and basically need a Solaris Kernel expert to figure out how to add kernel level features of any large magnitude.
This is not the case anymore. I was able, with autoconf, automake, and m4 templates (and of course some C++ glue) to actually integrate two libraries (zfs and snappy-c) that know nothing about each other. This is a testament not just to the auto tooling, but the level of maturity of a lot of open source software out there. While make is still technically a black box (yes, make scripts are simple in concept, fine...but go look at Illumos makefiles and we'll talk...), it may be ok for make to stay in the shadows...like some x86 assembly that gets generated on the fly...
I just might, after this zfsonlinux + snappy release, revisit illumos. But from what I recall of the original opensolaris documentation (which illumos referenced early on), you edit Makefiles directly, and basically need a Solaris Kernel expert to figure out how to add kernel level features of any large magnitude.
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