On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Joshua Hoblitt wrote:
> What still needs to be done:
> - CLI options need some minor tweaks
I think they need some major design. In particular, it would be
nice to have a documented consistent interface to setting or
unsetting various things. Then, it would be *very* nice to have a
glossary somewhere (e.g. like perl5's Porting/Glossary.pod) that defined
what all the various things are the could be set.
Here's an example: Recent changes broke jit compilation on SPARC. How
can I re-configure so that parrot tries to build without jit? Running
Configure.pl --help gives the following promising-looking option:
--jitcapable Use JIT
But how do you turn it off? Do you use --no-jitcapable?
--jitcapable=undef? --nojitcapable? --jitcapable=0?
Short of actually reading the code, there's no way to know.
I happen to like perl5's Configure -D and Configure -U option syntax, but
I can imagine other syntax too, as long as it's consistent, documented,
and easy-to-use.
> - The debugging traces could be neater
>
> - A usable log file would be handy
>
> - Makefile dependencies still aren't being setup rigorously
>
> - Last but not least, Leo's point about reviewing what the configuration
> steps are actually doing.
I'd also add:
- An option to just run the generation phase. For example, suppose
you're working on fixing up the makefile root.in. It'd be nice to just
run Configure.pl --generate (or some such) and have it regenerate the
generated files without having to go through and re-run all of the
Configure.pl tests.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
