Re: WML Development Recommenced

On Thursday 08 December 2005 01:29, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 11:19:44PM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Note that the Mandriva downstream patch requires testing with older
> > compilers than gcc4. So if you don't have gcc-4.x yet, please checkout
> > the sources and see if they compile.
>
> configure --with-openworld, make and make test works fine on Debian
> 3.0 Woody with gcc 2.95.4.

OK, thanks. I suppose that's an old enough version of gcc.

>
> > Then I'll convert the build system to SCons,
>
> Does this require to install scons first if I just want to install wml
> locally. 

The answer is mostly yes. First of all SCons is written in Python, and 
requires Python to be able to configure, build and install Python. That taken 
into account, the developer can either require the user to install SCons (a 
pure-Python package) or alternatively package a ready-to-run SCons version 
inside the package's distribution.

You can also try to cross-compile using SCons.

Note that Autoconf itself requires some dependencies like /bin/sh and the 
various POSIX utilities, it's just that it's assumed that they are generall 
available on any UNIX system. (Yet, have to be explicitly installed on 
Win32). You can't bootstrap something out of nothing.

> Or is this more an autoconf replacement, which generates the 
> configure or build scripts?

It does not generates scripts - it is a replacement for both Autoconf and 
make. Since it uses portable commands written in Python it's also not 
susceptible to various shell-imposed whims. (as "make" is). 

I should note that there's also CONS:

http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/cons.html

Which is written in Perl (and was developed before SCons), but became 
unmaintained for a few years now.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email protected]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
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