On 17/12/2012 02:48, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
Nick Wellnhofer pointed out off-list that a recent commit of mine made it
impossible to pass compiler flags on the command line via Module::Build's
`--extra_compiler_flags` param.
Hey, how did you find that comment on Github? It was mainly meant as
note to myself ;)
(; Extending Charmonizer to handle
compilation might actually be the most elegant approach -- we've already
abstracted the compiler and the shell to an extent -- but heads may explode if
I propose writing build scripts in C so I'll save that for later. ;)
I've also been thinking in that direction when working on the C
bindings. It sounds like a crazy idea, but that could be said about
Charmonizer as a whole. OTOH, Charmonizer does its job very well, and
using C is the only approach that really works cross-platform.
FWIW, here is the preliminary Makefile that I currently use in my work
on the C bindings:
http://s.apache.org/fBI
If you ignore the huge list of source files, it's actually quite simple.
So it doesn't sound like too much a stretch to generate it using C.
I also began to port this Makefile to Windows' nmake, and here are some
observations:
* There is a small but usable subset of features that can be used with
nmake as well as GNU make. So some parts of the Makefile can be shared
verbatim.
* Rules for compiling and linking can be written in a cross-platform way
using Makefile variables for all the separate parts of the commands.
* Path names can sometimes be problematic. Windows generally accepts the
forward slash as directory separator, but there are always some cases
where it doesn't work or needs a work-around.
* Windows is probably the first platform that will break because of
overlong command lines (8K limit).
* External commands can be hard to emulate on Windows. Even something
simple like "rm" can be much more complicated.
I made an initial attempt to put the bulk of the Makefile in a
platform-independent file which then is included by platform-dependent
Makefiles. This approach seems to work, but some of the corner cases
need rather inelegant solutions. So I'd like to look into a way to
generate Makefiles programmatically using parameters provided by
Charmonizer.
In any case, I'm still planning to merge the chaz_compiler_flags branch into
master. If the ability to pass extra_compiler_flags via the command line is
important, we can hack it back in; it just means a small setback with regards
to the the task of simplifying host build files.
Occasionally, I found it useful during development to pass compiler
flags to Build.PL. It's also a nice feature for users with special
compilation needs. But it shouldn't hold you back from merging the branch.
Nick
