On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Axel Freyn <axel-fr...@gmx.de> wrote: > Hi, > On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 01:43:51PM +0100, Basile Starynkevitch wrote: >> On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 06:07:48AM -0500, Bill Cox wrote: >> > Unfortunately, while I could implement this idea in a few days, the >> > red tape would keep it in limbo so long that I'll likely die of old >> > age before it gets into Debian Stable. Oh, well... here's the dumb >> > idea anyway... In short, support a syntax in gcc like: >> > >> > $ gcc myprog.c -lgit://github/~waywardgeek/sonic=0.1 >> > >> > In theory, this would cause gcc to do the following: >> > >> > - Check and see if the requested library has already been >> > downloaded and built, and still in the cache >> > - If not, download the latest compatible signed version, verify >> > the signature, and compile it >> > - link to the library in the cache >> >> At a first glance, I find your idea crazy but nice (but what about header >> files *.h of the requested library?). I would be delighted to have it. Maybe >> others don't think that way (in particular, those not working on Linux, and >> those not working on a compiler running with a network connection). >> >> Very probably ccache is the better place to implement that, since it already >> do >> some (preprocessed) source code cache. http://ccache.samba.org/ >> >> However, my personal feeling is that GCC is quite conservative on the user >> features it is accepting. So I won't bet that your idea will be positively >> accepted. > Well, it is not exactly what you are asking for, but the depot_tools > used in the chromium developement might be a solution: > http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/depottools > The can keep track of different libraries checkout out from svn or git > repositories, and calling "gclient sync" connects to all repositories > belonging to the project and verifies that all files are up-to-date. > May be that would be a better starting point than using gcc? > > Axel >
Well, after a short nap, the thought of fixing this in gcc seems even dumber to me, though the problem is quite real. Another tool called before gcc could get the header and library files into a place where they could be used. It could even be compiler independent. A bit of Googling reveals Zero Install. Looks like these guys are trying to tackle the problem. Bill
