*A Modest Proposal* * * The problems with the auto* tools are myriad and well-documented in the grey hairs and bald pates of many a poor soul who's had to put them to use. Other environments suggested -- CMake, QMake, Jam, et al -- suffer from assorted platform problems including (but not limited to):
1. Not being ported to many potential target platforms (QNX, for example). 2. Supporting some platforms better than others. 3. Requiring huge resources to get working. One option -- using a Bourne shell script (perhaps augmented with Awk) -- works well on POSIX-compliant systems but, again, leaves Windows users in the lurch for no particularly good reason. (Yes, I know of Cygwin -- and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I also know of MinGW/MSYS, but this is a suboptimal solution for people who don't *want* to Unixify their boxen.) So... My proposal is to put all platforms on an even footing. Generate the Makefiles using a SNOBOL4 <http://www.snobol4.org/> program. SNOBOL4 isn't native to *any* platform any longer, but there is a SNOBOL4 implementation available for a whole lot of systems <http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/>, and there are very few languages (read: none) that have SNOBOL4's raw power for text manipulation. Of course SNOBOL4 isn't on every platform by default, but that, too, is OK. The tarball for that SNOBOL4 system is under 3MB uncompressed (under ¾MB compressed) so we could just include a full SNOBOL4 implementation in Fossil itself and build it (ironically it uses auto*) as part of the building of Fossil. I mean yeah, sure, SNOBOL4 has a pretty funky and odd syntax, but it's far less painful than auto*....
_______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
