[M3devel] Build Server - Plan

[Jay K]

Autoconf output has little/none dependency.Sun's SPARC optimization are mostly irrelevant as we have little C code,unless you use the C backend.

 > somewhat of a test of C portability 
This I appreciate. We have some C code and the C backend.More compilers have "helped".The Tru64 compiler was another.On HP-UX in-box I had only K&R so resorted to gcc (Including bootstrapping through gcc 3.x;see m3-sys/m3cc/src/m3makefile...)We work with Microsoft Visual C++ too.And now clang -- having found and worked around a bug in its assembler.Some time soon I'll expand to Metrowerks and Digital Mars..
 - Jay


> Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 08:24:09 +0000
> From: microcode at zoho.com
> To: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: Re: [M3devel] Build Server - Plan
> 
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 07:52:13AM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> > The output of autoconf/automake should have lightweight dependencies.They
> > might stress make, might require GNU make.They might stress the sh, but I
> > think there are adequate shells out there. 
> 
> That is typically one issue with autoconf, requiring gnu tools in the
> path. On Solaris this can be annoying since most Solaris people don't use
> gcc or bash or have them in their path and not all (none of?) the gnu pieces
> are up to date or even current by any stretch of the imagination.
> 
> > They are meant to be easy for people building stuff to use.They aren't
> > meant to be easy for people developing stuff to use. 
> 
> Not sure what you meant here...
> 
> > Look at this way..while people complain and there are widelyused
> > alternatives like cmake, autoconf/automake are in widespreaduse, and they
> > do provide things that work for Linux, Solaris, BSD, MacOSX, Cygwin,HPUX,
> > Aix, Irix, etc. 
> 
> They often don't "work" for Solaris as-installed but they can most often be
> made to work. Increasingly, as automake and its prereqs get version bumps
> there are problems building apps on Solaris because Solaris installs with a
> very back-level version of gcc and a rather incomplete set of gnu tools. I
> ran into a problem with the last year where Solaris awk was not good enough
> to install(!) an app that compiled on Solaris as part of autotools so I had
> to download a newish copy of gawk and install it. So really, it is much
> better not to go there if you can avoid it.
> 
> I am not suggesting an alternative to autotools but just pointing out it is
> not really accurate to say they work on Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc. except for
> Linux. I also run BSD on several platforms and because of the same issues as
> with Solaris (old copy of gcc and gnu tools and POSIX-compliant awk, sed,
> shells, etc. not being good enough for autotools) it is sometimes
> non-trivial and painful to get Linux apps built on BSD. There is obviously
> no good/easy solution to this, just to point out it is not the slam-dunk as
> might be thought. 
> 
> > Furthermore, consider any platform that has a native gcc, is likely
> > buildingthat with autoconf/automake.
> 
> Conceded, yet on Solaris it is not clear why gcc is there. It is old and it
> is in a non-standard location and is often not used. Ideally, apps to be run
> on Solaris should be able to be built with native (non-gnu) tools. The
> Studio compilers are very good and have optimizations for SPARC that should
> be better than what gcc can provide and it is also somewhat of a test of C
> portability since Studio doesn't necessarily provide all non-standard gcc
> extensions.
> 
> 
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