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Re: Improvement to makemakefile script


Thomas Koeller wrote:
Doing eCos development requires a number of different things to be
installed - gcc, GNU binutils, Tcl/Tk, even more exotic stuff like
wxWindows. Building the HTML documentation requires jade, style
sheets, maybe even TeX and some macro packages.

And every package you mention is portable to many hosts, and doesn't require bash. Most are based on autoconf/automake which go to extraordinary lengths to a) be absolutely portable on many many systems; and b) avoid dependent packages having to worry about portability.


Automake wouldn't need to exist if every package could just say "use GNU make".

Now bash is a pretty standard program that virtually everybody has,
or could easily install.

Only easily if they have root on their machine. You could invoke makemakefile directly with bash, but then we have to think about every subshell and script it runs, which would probably revert to running sh.


I just can't see the point in taking any
pains, however small, just because there may be a remote possibility
of someone wanting to do eCos development on a system that has all
those software packages, but no bash.

Building host tools is not something we expect people to have to do much, and there are the command line tools anyway - in fact that's one of the big reasons they exist... to allow eCos to be used on systems the graphical tool can't be ported to.


But building documentation is something anyone may have to do - and we desperately don't want to discourage, and it depends on jade, which is bad enough, but I see no reason to make it worse and make a big long list of dependencies.

I apologize for being this penetrant, but, as you rightfully stated,
it is a question of principle, and I'd like to point out that one
generally accepted principle of open source software development is
to build upon the work of others where it makes your work easier,
and not to re-invent the wheel. I'd say we should follow this principle,
too, don't you agree?

Very few other open source packages use that principle - most value portability over developer convenience. The ones that don't are generally intended for a single OS anyway, e.g. Linux.


Jifl
--
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


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