Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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xz backdoor and autotools insanity - FelipeC (felipec.wordpress.com)

submitted 7 months ago by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I agree that autocrap is the worst build system in use now. However writing plain Makefiles is not an option for projects that are more complex than hello world. It is very difficult to write them portably (between various OSes, compilers and make implementations) and to support cross compiling. That's why developers used to write configure scripts that evolved to autocrap.

Happily we have better alternatives like cmake and meson (I personally prefer cmake and don't like meson, but it is also a good build system solving the complexity problem).

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 4 points 7 months ago

Agreed. One flaw of autotools imho is that writes the configure script in sh. The rational was that the target system might not have other stuff installed.

However, it resulted in a machine-generated (very complex) shell script often without any comment. People also modify the generated shell script itself, because it's committed in the project's git repository. This is one reason why the problem explained in this blog got unnoticed.