There was a flurry of activity on perl6-internals a few weeks ago about creating/finding a cross platform build system for building parrot and perl6.
I'm trying to restart that discussion over here in perl6-build, to try and get the collective mindset to put together a proposal for how this might end up looking, so that a plan can be crafted to get there. Right now, the build process (on UNIX-alikes) looks like this: 1) use perl5 to run Configure.pl, which generates a Makefile, config.h, and some perl5 modules. 2) run make, which runs a combination of perl scripts and the C compiler. The perl5 dependency is expected to go away eventually, and there are some people who would like to see the make dependency go away, so that there can be a unified build process on all platforms. This means, that either: a) parrot needs to bootstrap itself from some platform-dependent bootstrap script. (and hopefully there would only need to be a few of these, bootstrap-unix.sh, bootstrap-windows.bat, bootstrap-vms.dcl). or b) An external build tool that runs on all the target platforms (which really means "all platforms" needs to be found. Jam (http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html) has been proposed as possibly the best option in this case. or c) A hybrid, where an external build tool is used to bootstrap a parrot/tinyperl6 based solution. or d,e,f, and g) There are always other options. As I said above, I'm trying to trigger a discussion to build at least an initial direction that we want to aim for. People are already running into porting issues with the existing system, and putting in workarounds - lets try and head that off before it's too late. -R (either dropping a pin, or pulling it from the grenade.) --
