Die GNU autotools

[Elazar Leibovich]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:05 AM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il>wrote:

> But it's a system (or user-installed) library. Why would I need to bundle
> it with my code?
>

You just hit the nail on its head!
Few years ago, you were correct, harddisks were thin, memory was spare, and
if you could use a preinstalled library it'll be a great benefit.
Nowadays, developer time is expensive, QA time is expensive, support time is
expensive. Memory is cheap, CPU is cheap, disk space is cheap. So I'd rather
include another Megabyte of library the user already have, than make
building and supporting my software more complicated=more expensive.

As mentioned, Mathworks would rather include a compatible JVM with matlab,
then use the one availible on the computer. The cost of that is miniscule
(another 20Mb on the disk, maybe a bit more memory, assuming the user is
using another JVM software simultaneously), and even if the only thing it'll
save you is the support call "it says JRE 1.2 is not supported, please
upgrade. How do I do that?", it probably well worth it, not to mention the
reduced cost of testing, the freedom of using more advanced API, etc etc.
This is not always true, but I think that nowadays adding a library of 100Kb
to almost any software, *always* costs less than maintaining it with ifdefs.
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