On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 01:21:06AM -0400, Steve Litt via Talk wrote:
Yep. With Suckless Tools 1 second compiles, you're just compiling your life away. No doubt about it. I'd much prefer a 4 deep 4 wide dependency tree with different versions differently timed with massive attack surfaces and numerous entry points for supply chain exploits!
By the way, as I said earlier in the thread, I personally write my software using config files. But I'm certainly not going to ignore the robust simplicity advantages of Suckless Tools just because their config is sometimes in a .h file that's easy to change and recompiles in a second.
I had never heard of these programs before. I think I will refer to them as suck more tools though, because that sounds like absolute shit design. If you need to keep multiple builds around to handle different settings, that makes a mess, and a given binary can't even tell you what the config was that was used to build that particular version. Config files, command line arguments and environment variables are not hard to support and make things much more flexible. Anything is better than compile time configuration. It looks like someone learned about #ifdef and decided they had a hammer and the solution to all problems. -- Len Sorensen