[m-dev.] A not-very-polite rant about "grades" and the build system.

[Michael Richter]

On 13 March 2015 at 13:56, Matt Giuca <matt.giuca at gmail.com> wrote:

> You probably could have saved yourself some effort and made some friends
> if you wrote a polite mail to this list in the first place, before you
> spent two days trying to debug it yourself.
>

I tried this before.  On 2013-03-24 to be precise.  I wrote a very polite
critique of the build system along with some proposed solutions for it and
for the troubles it causes.  It was very politely bike-shedded, then
ignored.

Community leadership may find they get the behaviour they reward.  If they
want courtesy they should respond positively to courtesy.  This is very
basic motivational psychology.  The kind of stuff you get in Psych 101
classes.

PS. Your main complaint is answered in the second question in the official
> FAQ
> <http://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-release/mercury_faq/Installing.html>
> .


P.P.S.  No, actually, it isn't.  My main complaint is that the build system
is retarded and undocumented for all practical purposes.  My main complaint
is that there are NO PROVIDED TOOLS for using that "LIBGRADES=<grades>"
(which, on top of everything else, isn't even the correct way to do this
any longer; the correct modern way to do it is with
--enable-libgrades=<grades>).  Or can you find the place in the docs where
the correct selection of grades and their interactions is put?  (Hint: no,
you can't.)

P.P.P.S. Before lecturing me, Sparky, you probably should check history
*and* check that the docs you so smugly point out are a) the actual answer
to the problem (they aren't), and b) even accurate (they're not).

I strongly recommend that you think carefully before responding.  And if
that's too much work for you, don't bother responding.  I'm not in the mood
for listening to the wilfully ignorant.

-- 
"Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions
of entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese
people. It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot."
--Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra.
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