Ok, great. Thanks. I'll see what I can do.
Random idea off the top of my head, note that this assumes that configure
will use perl to work, if this is not going to be true, this probably won't
work.
I am the Bugzilla Installation Owner and have been tinkering with similar
things lately to setup a new install system for Bugzilla. I have sample code
that would do part of the work, though it would need tinkering to work for
parrot. The idea is to have the Configure.pl script itself run .cm files
located in Config/, these .cm files (configuremodule) would do the actual
work of configuration. The Conf.pm module would contain a set of API's for
the .cm files to call. (this is all portable of course...) An example .cm
file would be like:
#Basicquestions.cm, by Zach Lipton
#This file under some license TBA
package Conf::Basicquestions;
use Conf;
my $output = >>"EOF";
Now I need to ask you a few questions about your configuration so I can
configure your copy of parrot.
EOF;
output(
# the format for ask is ask(questionname,question,defaultanswer);
ask('name','What is your name?','Larry Wall');
ask('quest','What is your quest?','To build a better perl');
ask('standards','What group creates many standards and sounds like falling
off the bridge?','IEEE');
# ask() will handle asking the question, supplying a default, and storing
the answer in %c
# the last .cm file will then generate conf files, makefiles, etc
There are other API's in Conf.pm so I can sniff an answer from the env and
then write:
setconf('name','lwall');
Based on sniffing for the current username, etc...
So anyway, what do you think about this? Again, I have real code which I can
supply, but am I way offbase here? To me, the main advantage is getting
everything out of a "monster-script" and breaking it up into packages.
Zach
On 11/3/01 2:47 PM, "Brent Dax" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Zach Lipton:
> # Hello everybody
> #
> # I am interested in helping out with configure. I don't know
> # too much about
> # parrot, but I have decent perl skills (I can do what I want
> # to do when I
> # want to do it) and am interested in helping out. What can I
> # do to help?
> # (time to spew the to-do list ;)
>
> Welcome to the team! Right now Configure is pretty stable. Most of the
> work in the internals at the moment seems to be Simon hacking away at
> getting PMCs (basically variables) working. You may just want to poke
> around the Parrot package for now and get familiar with things.
>
> Another thing you can try is implementing a little language for Parrot.
> There are a couple examples of these in the languages/ directory of the
> Parrot source distribution. Obviously you'll need to know Parrot
> assembly to do that, but it's really not as hard as you'd think--the
> sort of generalizations used for a Parrot compiler are often easier to
> deal with then trying to implement a specific algorithm in assembler.
> (Probably because Parrot is a pretty high-level sort of assembler.)
>
> Whatever you do, have fun, and Happy Hacking!
>
> --Brent Dax
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Configure pumpking for Perl 6
>
> When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10
> empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.
> --Dubya
>
