Re: [Tinycc-devel] VPATH builds

[Thomas Preud'homme]

Le mardi 18 décembre 2012 21:29:22, grischka a écrit :
> 
> > I can provide help to provide other useful targets, such
> > as "make dist" and "make distcheck".
> 
> Thomas who manages a distro (debian) might want to comment.

Sorry, I never used these targets yet in the projects I touched. What are they 
suppose to do? As to make check, I know build helper tools in Debian try to 
call make test for projects with a Makefile. So it means make test must be 
pretty widespread too.

> 
> > Actually, is it on purpose that Autoconf and Automake are
> > not used?
> 
> I think so.  Tinycc is fast and small.  The Autospam chain stands for
> being obscenely slow and bloated.  Using it would damage Tinycc's karma.

I don't know much about autotools but surely it must be possible to disable 
all the tests autotools-generated configure do. Anyway, it would be a pretty 
big change and I don't feel like doing it. And if we'd consider doing the 
change, we'd need first to consider the benefits and then only do the change 
while keeping all the functionality in place.

> 
> >> Anyway, if you want to revamp our tiny testsuite per se, for example
> >> split the tcctest.c mess into single tests (or theme related chunks)
> >> and/or integrate that with the (by someone recently added) tests2 stuff
> >> then I'll certainly not object to that. ;=)
> > 
> > I have still plenty to discover about tcc, but I'll have
> > a look :)
> 
> Great.
> 
> > What do you think about the VPATH-builds related changes?
> 
> I think it can't hurt provided it works.  Build directories for
> the cross-compilers (arm-tcc etc ...) would be nice too.
> 
> Btw, the term "VPATH-builds" seems to be an autospam metabolite, also.
> I've actually never seen it and it is not very descriptive either,
> because
> a) it assumes specific knowledge about make's VPATH mechanism, but
> b) if you happen to share that knowledge then you also know that VPATH
>     and "Out-of-Tree build" play on quite different levels.

VPATH is the mechanism to implement it. Out-of-tree is the name of the 
functionality. So the name used in the doc should turn around out-of-tree 
build I think.

> 
> Of course, support in make for platforms, modules, directories, options,
> (that is for anything but the most simple hello_world), is very weak,
> traditionally and still.
> 
> In an ideal world make would offer name- and option-spaces natively
> nowadays, and autospam would just bitrot somewhere as the small script
> that it was once before it became a virus.  ... I got distracted.

What do you mean by name- and option-spaces?

> 
> --- grischka

Tom