[Vm-dev] updating configure.ac

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Phil,

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:31 AM, phil at highoctane.be <phil at highoctane.be>
wrote:

>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 8:59 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 17 Oct 2016, at 02:07, Ben Coman <btc at openInWorld.com> wrote:
>>
>> Phil, Could you outline the steps.  Are you doing something other than
>> this...
>> https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm
>>
>>
>> I think he is talking “in general”, not about the VM in particular.
>>
>> In general. But also about the VM since I wanted to build it for
> OSX/Win/Linux and CMake + the image code supporting it, while initially a
> royal PITA (version had to be correct etc) proved to be very useful for a
> lot of things because it was all logical, variables could be set nicely etc.
> The CMake UI also allows to detect for a number of crappy mistakes, so, a
> godsend.
>
> It can also generate XCode project files, which is very useful.
>
> autoconf and makefiles, no thanks.
>
> The image side CMake support looks great to me, better than the VMMaker
> green UI, which well, let's keep it at that.
>

That tool is not used to generate VM source.


>
> It also working nice with a CI server, so why use stoneage tooling when
> you have a more modern one available?
>
> Learn the damn CMake and profit. We want a great VM, let's use great tools.
>

There is agreement amongst the CogVM builders that
- we will use cake or autoconf to generate a cogConfig.h that describes the
build target platform's capabilities
- we will /not/ use either autoconf or cake to generate VM makefiles
- we will write linux makefiles in the style of the windows and mac
makefiles, all using gmake

We are not using bad tools; cake and autoconf are all useful in their
place, but experience has shown that they are not good tools for generating
the makefiles we use to build the VM, primarily because they are slow,
being painful to run on each make, and because they are higher-order, so
figuring out what input to change to achieve a changed output is indirect,
and may require a build step (running autoconf/cmake).  The makefiles we
have for windows and mac are much better; they are fast, running
immediately, and direct, their configuration options never depend on
rebuilding the make system, only in their configuration files
(plugins.int,plugins.ext
and attendant platforms/foo/plugins/Makefile files).


HTH

Phil
>
>
>
>> Esteban
>>
>> (there you go, with content stripped as Tim like :P)
>>
>>
>
>


-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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