The slippery slope of open source

Open source software is fun for the user, but can often times prove challenging for the outside developer. Why? I feel that documentation is a major contributor.

If you work with open source software, you’ve been to the place I’ll describe in this column more times than you care to count. It always starts innocently enough. In my case, I needed to re-create a Linux-based development environment on my Apple PowerBook. The essential ingredients were Apache, Berkeley DB, mod_python, and libxml2. Pretty standard stuff, but I’d never assembled all the pieces on Mac OS X.

If you don’t work with open source software, it’s hard to explain how weird this process of assembly can be. I’ve never actually run Autoconf, the GNU tool that’s used to generate the configuration scripts that probe every nook and cranny of your operating system, compiler, and libraries. But I’ve run lots of configuration scripts, and I fondly remember the cover of a 1988 issue of The Perl Journal. It depicted an Underwood typewriter, circa 1940, with this transcript rolling across the platen… Source: InfoWorld

[tags]open source,apache,mac os x,typewriter[/tags]