casey@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom) (01/06/89)
I know I'm supposed to call the software something else, but I can never remember what you want us to call it. In any case, this is just a purely gratuitous note complementing you on your tremendous software engineering effort. In particular I want to praise you for the ease of retargetting and general configuring of X. I'm in the middle of re-editing every bloody Makefile in the ditroff distribution right now and getting ready to do the same for the transcript software and the difference between these packages and X is night and day. I wish I could take the time to convert the stupid packages to imake, but the people responsible for both packages obviously had absolutely no idea whatsoever what they were doing or any concept of what real software engineering is all about. I'm hoping that your work will serve as a shining light to others who aspire to create, manage, maintain, and distribute a portable software system. I'm truly tired of software systems whose READMEs start off with ``edit the following hundred files if you don't want to install this software in the directories we like to here at Hoboken Laboratories ...'' (Extreme apologies if there's actually a company with that name.) Great work guys and gals!! Let's have more software engineering in the world and less hacking. Casey