Le Tue, 7 Feb 2012 08:38:16 -0800, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> a écrit :
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Dr. David Kirkby > <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > On 02/ 6/12 09:09 AM, Jeroen Demeyer wrote: > >> > >> On 2012-02-06 09:33, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > >>> > >>> I think trying to replicate autotools would be just silly. > >> > >> That's what PARI tried and they are probably the spkg with the > >> *most* patches to the configuration system. > >> > > > > More fool them. > > I am not suggesting *replicating* autotools. I'm suggesting that we > should clearly identify exactly what this "./configure" is supposed to > accomplish before deciding on what tool to use to implement it. > Autconf may or may not be the right choice. Let me first start by saying that I disagree with calling pari developpers fools! A configure script is there to make the sources ready for compilation. Once you have configured the sources, they are supposed to just build. So it's the place where you detect what kind of hardware you're targetting (endianness, size and number of registers, availability of floating-point or vector units, etc), what kind of software you have available for the build (compilers, libraries, presence and version), what kind of software you have available for the runtime (which may not be the same). An autotools based build system has nice properties when done right : - the autotools need not be installed on a system to be used, ie: the sage developpers will need them to generate the configure script, but they are not needed to run the configure script ; - they handle out-of-tree builds nicely ; those can be used to build a same source code with different options (including the next point) ; - they make it easier to cross-build for another architecture ; - the different distributions' maintainers have it easy to package your software ; - they help with portability, as they handle a huge amount of different things. Snark on #sagemath -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
