On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Jeff Horwitz wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> > Most of them (cat, chmod, cp, mkpath, mv, rm_f, rm_rf, and touch) are
> > documented in config/init/defaults.pm as '#some utilities in Makefile'.
> > I don't know whether or not they are a problem. They are documented
> > as variables to be used in a Makefile, and they work quite well in
> > that context. However, they are also sufficiently vanilla commands that
> > expanding out the $(PERL) would probably make little or no difference.
> > It also may not be at all relevant, since I'm unclear whether you are
> > trying to use these utility commands outside of a Makefile. If you are,
> > you may be better off just using the ExtUtils::Command versions directly.
> >
> > The remaining ones (libparrot, libparrot_shared, libparrot_shared_alias,
> > and libparrot_soname) look to me as if they can (and should) simply be
> > expanded by Configure.pl in the first place.
>
> i think we're on the same page here.
Yes, I think so.
> "the problem" is that i am indeed using these outside of a Makefile. so will
> things like "configure" if it tries to detect parrot and its headers and
> libraries -- it doesn't bother with Makefiles either.
To be fair, however, an external "configure" should only ask for
variables that are documented to be useful and it should use them in
their documented way. It's not unreasonable to expect that variables
(like chmod) that are documented to be 'utilities in Makefile' are
intended for use in Makefiles, and are irrelevant outside of that
context. (Though, as I said above, it's not a big deal to expand
them.) In any case, I doubt an external "configure" command would
be asking what parrot thought 'chmod' is anyway.
> in the case of mod_parrot i'm only concerned about the libparrot variables in
> particular, but if we do this, we should still expand $(PERL) and any other
> variables for consistency.
That's what I thought, and I agree with you. I was suggesting
expanding them *once*, in Configure.pl, not once in each Makefile and
again in a hypothetical parrot_config generating utility.
--
Andy Dougherty [email protected]
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