On Jun 23, 2007, at 7:48 PM, Paul Guyot wrote:
I also recently noticed the lack of build.cppflags-append and asked
the list about it and got no response.
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-May/001774.html
I wasn't aware configure.env was deprecated. It's still used and
required by many ports. I thought we just deprecated using
configure.env for setting LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS. Is that all you
meant?
I don't think we deprecated configure.env and that there is any plan
to do so.
Right, I incorrectly extrapolated the intention of your
configure.*flags-{append,delete} work to the overall deprecation of
configure.env declarations, but I can certainly see many, many
examples in which environment variables other than *FLAGS need to be
passed.
Now, on current usage of configure.env (given your new environment
parser), are Portfile authors meant to use configure.env-
{append,delete} to {add,delete} something to the default environment
MacPorts provides out o the box (-O2 and others)? Or are plain
configure.env declarations still OK? (that is, do they or do they not
override what we do to the environment behind the scenes?)
There is some code in base/ that parses flags in configure.env, and
this is the bit that might go away, maybe with a warning, once a
grep would have revealed that no port still uses configure.env for
*FLAGS.
The rationale behind configure.*flags was that it was the easiest
solution to solve several problems at once and to provide features
we wanted. Setting those flags is quite a frequent operation and
parsing them from configure.env is error-prone and problematic, for
example it is difficult to figure out the declarative value of each
flag, if the flag was inherited, was there because of a variant or
was there in the base portfile. Now that we process flags
separately, we provide options that are more declarative and we can
handle a reasonable default for universal builds while providing a
way to implement a specific variant for that, we provide a
reasonable default for the flags including the over-spread -I$
{prefix}/include and -L${prefix}/lib, thus simplifying and having
portfiles using those flags properly (most of the flags were set in
an effectless manner), and we also now compile stuff with a default,
reasonable optimization flag (-O2, I know many people here would
prefer -Os, or believe Apple says so), while the past behavior was
such that many software built with MacPorts were not optimized while
they would have been optimized if built manually -- because if you
don't provide any CFLAG to autoconf' generated configure, it uses
the default value including -O2 when using gcc.
All this I understand, but...
I don't see any similar rationale for build flags. I believe build
flags being really required is quite rare, and that we would break
ports if we provided a default for build flags. We do not *need* all
the logic that exists for configure flags. Providing that as part of
a complete framework that would unify the syntax might make the work
of port maintainers easier, but this will certainly add some
confusion (should this flag be in configure or in build flags?) and
drive them to use build flags where they are in fact not required,
or where they would conflict with configure flags.
What if there's a port out there with, for example, a broken autoconf
based build system that does not cascade its configuration flags down
properly to the generated Makefiles? In this case, wouldn't passing
them to the build environment help? If so and the case being rare as
you say, do you consider a single build.env declaration in the
relevant Portfile to be good enough to handle the case? I ask the
question 'cause I've seen some Portfiles that pass stuff like compiler
macros plus the standard *FLAGS in build.env and not in configure.env.
Paul
Regards,....
-jmpp
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