GNU’s definitely too messy for my taste

“I’m pretty sure not to say something wrong when I say that the
majority of the readers of this blog would agree that Open Source
and Free Software development can produce better software by many
different measures. Better overall quality is just theoretical; you
have more portable code, more standard code, faster coder, less
memory-hungry code and so on so forth. One of the measures you can
figure out is code cleanliness, but even that is very subjective.
So this is why I’m talking about taste.

“So what’s the problem here? Well, while I think the end result
of GNU software is generally very good, I find the general code
very messed up and pretty much unreadable and unusable. I have
criticised gnulib’s approach before regarding the way they
duplicate the same code over and over, rather than provide a
“portability” library to use where glibc is not used, and the
system libraries don’t provide enough functionalities. Lately, I
also noticed that they add tons of redundant autoconf checks to
project running them, some of which have been broken from time to
time, in different ways (I had to fix diffutils and m4 the other
day because they had an automagic dependency over libsigsegv (and
that changed its ABI on the tinderbox recently).”

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