[Vm-dev] Why the hell directives for compiling with clang were not taken into account

[David T. Lewis]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 03:54:15PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>  
> Hi Holger,
> 
> > On Apr 2, 2018, at 7:00 AM, Holger Freyther <holger at freyther.de> wrote:
> > 
> >> On 2. Apr 2018, at 14:51, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Gah!
> >> 
> >> despite my stuttutututter command:
> >>    CC=clang ./configure CC=clang
> >> the travis build is completely ignoring the directives and keep using gcc
> >> 
> >> See:
> >> https://travis-ci.org/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/jobs/361174043 <https://travis-ci.org/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/jobs/361174043>
> >> 
> >> I suspect that it's lack of clean build, but not sure...
> >> 
> >> Building OpenSmalltalk VM in /home/travis/build/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/build.linux32x86/pharo.sista.spur/build.itimerheartbeat...
> >> <>Re-exec as x86
> >> <>clean? ok but this isn't safe!!
> >> Or would the clang compiler be absent?
> >> Or what?
> >> 
> >> It ain't fun...
> > 
> > The cost of abstraction... I am not a fan of the "build" scripts (a lot of code cloning for what[1] gain?) and the travis logs don't show us the invocation of the actual commands.
> 
> The complexity is due to the arcane nature of the Linux/Unix build system and its use of autoconf and several scripts to generate makefiles.  I have been saying for years that we need to rewrite the Linux build system to use convention makefiles as per Andreas' Windows makefiles and my subsequent Mac OS Makefiles.  I rewrote the Mac OS build system to use makefiles (*) and you'll notice that
> - all share a small suite of makefiles in build.macosXXX/common
> - all have a single top-level Makefile that defines the vm variant (the vm source directory) and some branding
> - all mvm scripts under build.macosXXX are identical and serve only to invoke make with the three variants, production, assert & debug VMs

Hi Eliot,

To be perfectly honest, I do not know what it meant by "we need to rewrite the Linux
build system to use conventional makefiles". Using makefiles would be a given for any
build system on unix/Linux, the differences (and pain points) are in the configuration
step. Regardless of whether you use autoconf or CMake or something else, we would still
need something to specify the environment in which the makefile is operating. In other
words, we need a build/config.h to specify the things that the makefile does not know
about. I am pretty sure I am misunderstanding something in this discussion, but I am
comfused and I may as well admit it.

Dave