Guys, I've been wanting to relax the dependency that parrot's core has on parrot_config. As things stand at the moment, src/global_setup.c makes a call to parrot_get_config which is linked into the executable itself by selecting either null_config.o, parrot_config.o or install_config.o.
This works pretty well on most platforms so far, but is a major headache for building on cygwin (and Windows?) and perhaps some future platforms. Why? Well, some platforms have a limitation whereby a Shared Library or DLL cannot access symbolic information in the executable that loads them. This will affect us more as parrot is used as a library, or we try to get dynclasses working on awkward platforms. What I've done is add a function to optionally register the config string -- That way the call is exclusively from the executable into parrot only. The contents of the config *.c files is slightly changed, and the function parrot_get_config has been moved into a new file src/config.c (better names gladly accepted!) Since registering the config string is optional, utilities such as pbc_merge and pdb no longer need to link with null_config.o. At the moment this patch is for review as I'm expecting some good advise before it hopefully gets accepted. Cheers, Nick
config.patch
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