Re: TODO

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> >
> > > > The main issue I see with using embryo (or small, or Java) or any other
> > > > byte-code/VM based machine is that it seems to make it much more
> > > > difficult for the end-user to fix problems on their end.
> > >
> > > That would be no less true of a compiled ltmain.c.
> >
> > Even with a compiled ltmain.c, I expect that the platform specific rules
> > would be encapsulated in data files rather than being compiled into
> > ltmain.c.   That would allow end-users to adjust the rules. Ltmain would
> > simply be a rules processor.
>
> That could also be achieved with a byte-code ltmain.

Yes, of course.

When evaluating the direction to take for a C-based libtool, I tend to 
think of libtool being similar to `make' in that it is a rules 
processor.  The process of "configuring" libtool would be a matter of 
selecting which collection of rules applies to the current system.  I 
see that the "rules" are scripted somehow (could use /bin/sh as `make' 
does) and are easily changed, but the core libtool engine works 
identically on all platforms, and does not need to be based on 
scripting. The main argument to use a VM for internal libtool logic 
would be to reduce code size so the libtool footprint is smaller.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen