Dan,
sorry, although I'm a long term perl user I'm not that familiar with the internals of the perl development process that I know all the old stories ;)
The plan looks good, but some things are still unclear to me:
*) Person building runs platform-specific script
Platform specific means also cross-platform specific?
Not in this case, and I was being a bit broad. There are (or will be) two different ways to build parrot.
The first is with a platform-specific script. That means shell scripts for the various Unix (and Unix-ish, like Cygwin) platforms, a .BAT file for windows, a .COM file for VMS, and so on. Whether there's a per-platform shell script for the Unices or one generic one that'll work well enough to bootstrap to the "Use parrot because it's nicer" phase of the build's up in the air. This way assumes the user has a command-line prompt of some sort and a C compiler. One of the big reasons I want a non-make make tool is so we can teach it to generate these scripts for us from the dependency lists.
The second is the 'developer' way, which will assume more tools -- a working perl, make tool (maybe), possibly a working python or ruby (or parrot with all three), possibly lex&yacc or the closest equivalent.
The first method is for people who want to get the source tarball and build it for installation. The second is for people who want to do development work on parrot. Folks doing cross-platform stuff will presumably use the second way. (I don't think this is too unreasonable :)
> *) Configure probes environment
How do you probe a cross environment? The build process will in this case run on i686.
Since I've minimal (which is to say, absolutely no) cross-environment build experience, this bit's a bit dodgy. For building parrot itself, I'm assuming we can get away with a configuration file holding all the info we need to build parrot -- basically everything parrot's configure will probe for.
Building the ancillary stuff will be a bit problematic, since to do so will need parrot, but the parrot you'll have won't run on the platform you're on. So... I'm kinda at a loss there. I'm *more* than happy to take suggestions or wholesale direction here.
--
Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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