I’ve been doing some work on getting openssl to compile “out of the box” over the last few days. Peter Moore has done an amazing job keeping up with releases but as he admitted he just hacks each release so it works 🙂 This seems as though it’s the standard approach taken by BeOS developers – but why? To add full configuration support, the few small changes needed and a few extra files took very little time and once submitted (and hopefully accepted) will mean that from the next release onwards it’ll be possible to simply build openssl. Surely this is going to save a lot of time in the future?

I’ve talked before about the reluctance of BeOS devs to actually submit patches, so this is probably just another case of that, but I can’t help but wonder if the language used in configure scripts is another. Unless you’ve worked with such files before they are dauntingly complex and seemingly impossible to understand. Help is available though as there are people around who do know how these myseterious beasts work and can assist!

It’s not a sign of weakness to ask and people will have more respect for someone who admits they don’t know and gets help than someone who simply gives up. So, next time you start looking at a set of source code with configuration scripts that need work, #beclan will be there for you!