On 02/17/2018 06:31 PM, bartc wrote: > It could well do all that. But it surely cannot need 18,000 lines' worth > to do it; that much should be obvious to anyone. And in fact, for > building with MS's Visual Studio, it doesn't use that file at all, but > something smaller. (Although the MS build adds its own complexities.)
Hardly. Sorry Bart, but you're barking up the wrong tree there. There are may legitimate complaints about autoconf, but being able to read the generated configure script isn't one of them. That's like saying the disassembly of a compiled executable is needlessly complex. Of all people you should understand that, having made your own compilers. Managing a cross-platform build is very complicated stuff. Autoconf works, although there are other systems that work well too. I suspect you'd complain about them also, as they also generate scripts and makefiles that you'd find difficult to read. > Anyway a lot of that stuff also seems to be going on inside the C header > files - have a look inside pyconfig.h. (I tried my own C compiler on it > and it seems to think it's MSVC.) I'm pretty sure pyconfig.h is generated by the build system. So spending a lot of time in there isn't really that useful, except as a way of determining what features and configurations will be used by the rest of the source code. If you think Python's C header files are complicated, you should look at some of the GNU standard library header files sometime. Or really any cross-platform library's header files. As I said, managing the configuration of source code across platforms is a large and complicated problem. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
