Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] platform auto-detection mechanism

[Michele La Monaca]

Hi Mario,

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Mario Domenech Goulart
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Michele,
>
> On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 01:23:22 +0100 Michele La Monaca <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> I would never ever sacrifice a feature for the sake of
>> cross-compilation, I have seen other projects too encumbered by
>> cross-compilation to have the time and freedom to deliver anything
>> useful. But that's your project, of course.

Admittedly I was overstating here, sorry for that but I wanted to
stress the point.  Let me restate it more correctly: I wouldn't trade
innovation for this cross-buildness thing if there is no real
usefulness. Again, that is my humble opinion, this is your project.  I
think you've already delivered and delivered A LOT. I am really really
impressed, that's the reason I am around.

> Cross-compilation is critical, at least to me, since I need it to use
> Chicken at work.  Anyway, I think cross-compilation support is an
> important feature for any project.

I would sincerly like to have a better understanding of your use case.
But maybe we are already way too OT to continue this discussion in
this thread. Let's discuss it privately or start another thread if you
want to.

> You probably are thinking that Chicken is too conservative at accepting
> patches for the core.  It may be true, depending on your point of view,
> but there's a good reason for that: we have quite a few developers with
> very limited time using only a small subset of the considerably large
> number of supported platforms (hardware and software).  When something
> breaks, there's only a small group of people to expect fixes from.
>
> Some parts of the core are specially critical, and the build system is
> one of them.  If something breaks on a platform which is not easily
> available to developers, it can turn into a release blocker, for
> example.
>
> But, please, don't let all that put you down at contributing.

Don't worry, I am not that kind of person. Even if none of my patches
slip in, I will continue to use chicken and, possibly, contributing. I
think I can recognise good things and chicken is one of them, for
sure. Eventually, I might evaluate to mantain a private branch for
those patches I consider valuable to me.  Unfortunately, I have
another couple of ideas I want to implement, but I am afraid of the
ire of Jim, Peter and maybe even Felix :)

> Contributions are welcome, specially in the form of patches, like you
> are doing.  They are really appreciated, and we thank you.  But, for the
> sake of not breaking what is not broken, we have to be picky with regard
> to the critical core parts.

Fair.

> I see.  My main concern is not not autodetecting the platform, but
> misdetecting it.  That can be tricky on Windows (and remember: we have
> quite a few people testing on Windows).  The detected platform must
> match, for example, the syntax for paths in PREFIX (see section 5
> "Platform issues" in README).

You have a point here. Let me propose a compromise: detecting Windows
is easy and bullet-proof. Distinguishing among those Unix-like
flavours might be actually tricky. But once you have detected you are
on Windows you can stop further detection mechanisms and fall-back to
the normal system.  Of course you may be more informative in this case
if you want to. For example:

# make

Please select your target platform by running one of the following commands:
make PLATFORM=cygwin
make PLATFORM=mingw               ->    if unsure use this one
make PLATFORM=mingw-msys

For more information, consult the README file.
...

Regards,
mikele