On 6/24/14, 11:58 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
On 6/24/2014 2:52 PM, Kim Gräsman wrote:
My initial instinct was to contribute Python3 support to pymake, but I
got the impression from Gregory that Mozilla's long-term plan is to
abandon pymake in favor of the now Windows-friendlier GNU Make 4, and
that pymake is gradually becoming less maintained.
pymake was always a hacky project; we happened to use it in production
for a while because it could do -jN builds on Windows while binary make
would crash.
I started it primarily as a frontend for importing makefiles into other
formats, so that Mozilla can gradually stop using makefiles altogether.
So it does have an IR which you can use to build other tools.
In that light, I feel that there may be no point investing effort in
pymake as such, especially since we don't need a full Make
implementation. So now I'm considering forking a separate project
covering only Makefile parsing and some kind of semantic Makefile
model, probably heavily inspired by pymake.
Does this make sense, or are there strong pymake supporters who would
accept patches to improve packaging and py3k support?
I encourage you to branch from the existing pymake tree and do whatever
stuff you need. I also encourage you to keep a fully functional make
backend, not just the parsing/semantic frontend bits: that's really the
only way I had to prove that the parser was emitting the correct code,
and it turns out that in many cases it wasn't.
We're definitely stuck with py2k, so it would be nice to keep the code
2k/3k compatible. Otherwise it will be an unmergeable fork.
You should also keep in mind that make is not a static language that can
be parsed and turned into static rules. Variables and targets change as
make is executing. That means any kind of parsing must preserve variable
references as opposed to expanding them at parse time.
You can use pymake to parse the general structure of make files (rules,
variable assignment, functions, etc). But actually evaluating all the
"$" is very hard.
If you read my old blog posts (http://gregoryszorc.com/) I go into some
details of this. Search for "pymake." I have some code on GitHub that
attempted to add a parsing-friendly "data" API to pymake [1] [2]. I
can't remember what all I did, but I know there is an attempt at a
better parsing API there somewhere.
[1] https://github.com/indygreg/mozilla-central-legacy/tree/pymake_hacking
[2]
https://github.com/indygreg/mozilla-central-legacy/tree/build-splendid/python/pymake-bs
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