On Mon, 19 Jan 2009, David Golden wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Martin Evans
> <martin.ev...@easysoft.com>wrote:
>
> > I didn't get the impression this person was doing a single report - he is
> > 16th on the leader board of test submissions. If the C compiler is not set
> > up properly (and see below because I did not generate the compiler error) he
> > could generate thousands of UNKNOWN for any module that has XS - does not
> > seem any point in that.
> >
>
> There's a debate at the moment on #p5p about whether it's an error to have
> $Config{cc} and not have the named compiler. If so, every AS perl is
> "broken".
This would be trivial to change. ActivePerl already determines the value of
$Config{cc} dynamically. It sets it to 'gcc' if cl.exe can't be found on the
PATH but gcc.exe is there.
When neither is found $Config{cl} remains at 'cl', indicating the compiler
this version of Perl was built with. Setting it to '' or even undef instead
would be trivial. However:
> There *is* a point -- it's how well does a distribution that requires a
> compiler deal with the situation where a compiler doesn't exist. Does it
> die with a reasonable error to a user? Or does it fail with something
> unintelligible. It's just a prerequisite like any other.
Right now you'll get a nice explanation from MakeMaker that your compiler is
set to Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler, but your LIB and INCLUDE variables
haven't been set up to match. It then doesn't generate a Makefile at all.
If you set $Config{cc} to the empty string MakeMaker will blindly insert this
into the generated Makefile and you get a bunch of warnings when you run
`nmake` that the '-c' command cannot be found.
If the "broken" version produces a sensible error message, and the "correct"
version produces a bunch of gibberish, then I prefer the brokenness.
I'm happy to get ActivePerl to change the value of $Config{cc} when no compiler
is found once the build tools do something sensible with an empty setting.
Cheers,
-Jan
