Re: [Chicken-users] unified bootstrap

[Brandon J. Van Every]

felix winkelmann wrote:
> Ow - harsh words. Ok... let me think... What I need:
>
> - fully workable build (cmake/autotools) on Linux and OS X, both from
> repo and tarball
>  (doesn't work yet) - I can try to assist here

Linux appears to have a bug in CMake, not the build itself.  I will 
wager that a workaround is pretty trivial, just shoving more 
dependencies in somewhere.  But the bug, whatever it is, does need to be 
reported.

Who can test OS X?

I still need to figure out if eggs are working on Windows CMake builds.  
At last count they weren't.

Otherwise, in principle, this functionality is Done.

> - tarball creation via cmake - including unsafe library files 
> (precompiled) and
>  csi/chicken-profile/chicken-setup/csc in precompiled form, since I 
> want to
>  work on making chicken more useful for cross-development; it also speeds
>  up the build

Please see my longer post about the conflict of interest between 
Autoconf cross-compilation vs. CMake use-same-build-everywhere.

"Speeding up the build" is not a weighty factor compared to other issues 
like stability, uniformity, and extensive testing of always-used code 
paths.  The CMake bootstrap is always going to be slower than the 
Autoconf build, because it is a two-stage bootstrap, and in that manner 
achieves more than the Autoconf build does.  With CMake, I don't have to 
worry what kind of old compiler is used; with Autoconf, you do.  I do 
not think it at all wise to short-circuite the two-stage bootstrap, even 
as an option, just so people can build things faster.  Making people 
test the canonical build, by building it, is far more important.

I also have to ask what kind of slowness is observed and what build 
speedups are important.  I'm developing on an 866 MHz Pentium III with 
512 MB RAM running Windows 2000.  A full build certainly gives me time 
to multitask, but it's a matter of tens of minutes, not hours.  I 
haven't wall clock timed it; I'll make a formal note of it in the 
future.  I will wager that on more recent hardware, build times are much 
quicker, but I could be mistaken as the speed of IO doesn't have to 
track increases in CPU power.

I would note that CMake is inherently faster than Autoconf for 
apples-to-apples tasks.  Autoconf is a shell script driven dog. 

> - it should *always* be possible to do
>  % ls
>  main.scm chicken.h library.c runtime.c
>  % cat main.scm
>  (print "hello, world!")
>  % csc -tx main.scm -uses library
>  % gcc runtime.c library.c main.c -o main -lm  # or the Win32-equivalent
>  This means, the base system without any bells and whistles is able
>  to be wrapped together with minimal external requirements and 
> command-line
>  magic (seems to work fine, but has to be kept in mind when thinking 
> about
>  generated headers or build-generated #define's)

Then I think this should be integrated as a formal build target, and 
regularly stress tested.  Frankly I have always wondered why Chicken 
needs so much libchicken gobbledygoo to get rolling.  If it really 
doesn't, how about a "chicken-small" target or some such?  Or more 
poetically, a "chick" target?

> - At some stage PCRE has to be built into chicken - but, to remove some
>  pressure, I decided to do it later (after the next release); I
> expect to be able
>  to integrate this myself, though (I have to be, anyway)

Doesn't strike me as a big build issue at any rate.

> I don't know of anything particular - it is also rather difficult to 
> anticipate
> what a complete cmake-based build has to fulfill, since much is just 
> taken
> for granted currently.

Well, if that's the culture, then the only way is to kick it out the 
door and see what floats back.  Billion dollar software empires have 
been built on this model, i.e. Microsoft, so we shouldn't be squeamish 
about it.  All we can do is anticipate and test the things we can think 
of.  Can't polish to perfection forever before releasing.  We don't have 
that kind of manpower, and it wouldn't necessarily be wise even if we did.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every