Re: cons for modular packages

[Axel Hecht]

Gary Oberbrunner wrote:

> > > > > > "SK" == Steven Knight <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   SK> On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Axel Hecht wrote:
>   >> 5) how about support for configure like feature tests? 
>
>   SK> There isn't any special support for testing, but Cons can be
>   SK> used very easily for executing tests.
>
> I think Axel's talking about the kinds of "system feature tests" that
> GNU configure runs on your system to see what it supports (word size,
> what's the return type from malloc, does it have memcpy or bcopy,
> etc. etc.) before building a package.  It generates a 'config.h' and
> all your Makefiles, and then runs make.
>
> Cons doesn't have anything like this built-in, but the beauty of it is
> it doesn't *need* to because it's just perl!  You could easily run a
> bunch of these tests from the Construct just like configure does (even
> easier in fact, because configure has to use minimal 'sh' features and
> we have all of perl), then write out a 'config.h' or whatever with
> those results, then just continue on with regular cons stuff.  Cons's
> dependency analysis stuff will just work like magic.  (You might have
> to write a config-tmp.h, compare it with the old one, and mv
> config-tmp.h config.h if it's different, to make sure the timestamp
> difference doesn't cause spurious rebuilds.)

Hi Gary, thanx for your response.

I was exactly looking for the feature tests, and it would be great to 
have some pretty setup
for this. In autoconf there are alot of useful macros to generate these 
feature tests, and cons
might want to have such a convenience as well.
This may go so far as to whether the compiler accepts a definition file 
or does not (a neat
feature in the mozilla build system).

Most important, autoconf has a great deal of ready to use macros, and 
getting people to change
might be easier with a smooth path to do so. All those packages (gtk, 
gnome, libidl..) with
foo_config to determine compile and link options might be worth a way to 
support in cons as
well.

Axel

PS: I hope I got the reply method right, I just replied to the list, 
hope this time I will be regarded
as subscribed