Mathieu Boespflug wrote:
Hi all,
Here is another proposed update for the YHC repository. Currently as
part of the build process either a snapshot is downloaded or a
subversion checkout is made on the libffi sources as found in the
Python subversion repository. When delving into the scons build system
for Yhc the first thing I did was import a version of libffi into the
Yhc repository. The build system shouldn't pull something of the
Internet every time a target needs to be built and make that target
fail when an Internet connection is not available. Also, isn't it best
to compile against a version that the Yhc developers know to work,
reimporting libffi from upstreams as the developers see fit and as the
developers get time to test that it works fine?
Agree entirely, I never really understood why compiling Yhc should
insist on an internet connection.
Instead of importing libffi from the python sources, I propose using
another, more complete version. libffi does not seem to be currently
maintained due to copyright issues but there seems to be a version of
it distributed by gcc-4.2 which is much more recent and complete. I
get the impression that version works on all platforms gcc has been
ported to (could be wrong though).
At the time we made the choice we considered both the python ctypes
version and the gcc version. In the end we rejected the gcc version
because it didn't have any support for the windows platform, whereas the
python version had been modified by the ctypes people so that it did.
Now it's entirely possible that this has now changed and the gcc version
supports windows, including use with MSVC. Since Neil insists that Yhc
should compile with MSVC (pfft, I never saw why, mingw always worked
nicely for me - though that's a different issue).
Given these constraints it would only be worth switching to gcc libffi
if it does definitely have windows support, including working in MSVC.
Thanks for all your contributions! :-)
Tom
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