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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

If a better build system were as easy as Kamp seems to think, he could have written it by now with 1/3 of the effort he's spent complaining about build systems over the years. Turns out the problems really are hard, and the layers of cruft are there for a reason.

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Part of the objection is Firefox has 122 dependencies, and some of those need Perl, some need Python, and some need both.

If developers are writing code (or build scripts) in the wrong languages, you can't fix that with a build system - you have to convince the people doing it to change their ways.

In a cathedral, hypothetically that could be an edict from the architect. In a bazaar, you find a soapbox to stand on and shout as loud as you can.

What we need is not AutoCrapNG™, but sensible convergence of platforms so that we don't need to guess or go hunting for if <stdlib.h> exists or not.

  as easy as Kamp seems to think

Straw man.

  Turns out the problems really are hard, and the layers of 
  cruft are there for a reason.

Yes to the first part, no to the second. The layers of cruft are there because different problems were solved. Problems that existed because of attempts to work around the actual problem. If the actual hard problem had been solved, no cruft would have been needed.

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