My response to "A Generation Lost in the Bazaar"

Poul-Henning Kamp argues that a whole generation of programmers is "lost" in the bazaar (strangely, although he refers to it, he seems to use different meanings of the words "bazaar" and "cathedral" than the ones used in ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar - PHK's "cathedral" seems to be an analogy for a designed program, rather than an analogy for a xenophobic elite) and wouldn't even recognize a cathedral if encountering one.

I added a comment and then a few hours later it was gone! ACM was censoring me! Luckily Google had indexed the page after I had commented, but before my comment disappeared, and I was able to reconstruct nearly my whole comment by searching for words and phrases I know I had used, and copying the search results' excerpts where I recognized them. It was only a temporary blackout though; I checked again as I write this and noticed my comment was back. Here it is, with some elaboration. (Sentences I missed in italics. Pretty good reconstruction, eh?)

Much of your rant seems predicated on the badness of the autotools. While some of your criticisms are certainly valid (even though I might not necessarily agree what the response should be), you seem to be burning the sources of inelegant software in effigy, by attacking the autotools. The creators of the autotools are not the ones responsible for the problems which the autotools were designed to address!

Secondly, some of your criticisms (here and in your autocrap rant) against the autotools are again misplaced: you seem to want to hold the autotools' creators responsible for the misuses to which others put them, sometimes due to innocent ignorance, other times due to an arrogant sense of superiority (poor translation: I want to convey the german word "besserwisserisch").

As others have pointed out, I'm not surprised either that there are features in a large dependency graph that go into a black hole, like the TIFF support you mention. My curiosity is somewhat piqued to know how this irony resolves. And specifically, is this a run-time dependency or a build-time dependency?

But here's another irony: you don't recognize the deliberate architecture to which the autotools were built. I wasn't around at the time to know if they were originally built cathedral-style (their development now seems very bazaar-like), and you might not appreciate the architectural style used, but boy, you'd better believe it, much of your interaction with them was *designed*. In my experience most of the "friction" in interacting with the autotools is due to the very sort of meta-ignorance you write of: not even knowing what the tools' raison d'être are, or "disagreeing" with them (as if that is possible). I like to say: Those who do not understand the autotools are doomed to reinvent them, poorly. Please understand that I mean a philosophical understanding; I'm sure you know very well what AC_CHECK_LIBS does, for example. And yes, I think I can agree with your criticism of keeping around 20-years-superseded feature checks.

P.S. I know I'm conflating cathedral-as-designed-artifact with cathedral-as-home-of-a-priesthood.

Others argued, and I agree, that a bazaar is the only style that is capable of delivering the gamut of systems we use today. PHK's lament reads a bit like a town planner despairing that there are no cities that consist only of cathedrals, that there's just so much damn chaos in the streets, with people just building their houses where they please! But that's pining for an unworthy goal: centrally planned economies don't work - a universally planned city would result in suburbs that are convenient to administer, but are not what their residents desire. Likewise, in the software world, one could have a landscape of only cathedrals, but then the bazaars would be gone, and so would be the users who shop at the bazaars.

I think it's important to consider the results of the evolutionary pressures acting on the software development industry. Clearly, the unruly bazaar strategies have largely displaced the cathedrals. In some instances we have even had direct invasions of individual members of the cathedral population: witness GCC's conversion to bazaar style with the 2.95 release. More recently, we had the XFree86 conversion to Xorg, another such conversion. I'm not aware of any conversions going the other way. This sort of conversion just doesn't happen consistently if there aren't strong ecological advantages to the bazaar strategy. And I suppose that's my objection to PHK's portrayal of our modern industry as a bunch of unruly wet-behind-the-ears kids who should get off his lawn, dammit, distilled into one word: ecology.