Really, Amazingly Silly Question

[Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de)]

Chris Lyon wrote:
> If you've used windows installers, it is difficult to understand the
> advantages of ./Configure,make, make install especially when they seem
> to break more often than not at some stage.

The reason for ./Configure and the like is that there are
so many different, incompatible flavours of unix around.
If you stick to one flavour (e.g. RedHat Linux) there are
tidier ways of installing things (e.g. rpm packages).
But when you compile from source, you're often dealing with
source that's trying to cope with a lot of different
potential environments.

The unix world is a lot more messy and complicated than
the Windows world, no argument. That's what you get with
a culture that has such a long, rich and varied history.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg