Re: Draft manifest

On Mon, 6 May 2002, Johan Vromans wrote:

> Nicholas Clark <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > Currently DynaLoader is written as a conventional extension, in XS, so
> > needs xsubpp to convert that to C. However, it already cheats as it is
> > actually colluding with Configure to work out which .xs file to use.
> > 
> > To me, it would make sense to convert the XS to C, and maintain DynaLoader
> > as C files, 
> 
> Any reason not to do this?

Well, it would mean more manual labor whenever xsubpp was changed, in
order to propagate those changes manually to the various .c files.
Historically, such changes haven't been huge so this isn't a big deal, but
it is one more thing to manually keep updated.

I suspect a more critical issue, however, is how to tell the system to
build the DynaLoader.  Currently we use MakeMaker, which allows us to
portably construct an appropriate Makefile for Unix, VMS, Win32, OS/2,
VOS, and whatever other operating systems might be supported.  I don't
know how else, without using perl, one might accomplish the same task. And
if you're going to use perl anyway to build the Makefile, I don't see the
big deal about using xsubpp.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		[email protected]
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042