“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…”