David Malcolm wrote:
>On Tue, 2018-07-17 at 14:49 +0200, Martin Liška wrote:
>> I've recently touched AWK option generate machinery and it's
>> quite unpleasant to make any adjustments. My question is
>> simple: can we starting using a scripting language like Python
>> and replace usage of the AWK scripts? It's probably question
>> for Steering committee, but I would like to see feedback from
>> community.
>
>As you know, I'm a fan of Python. As I noted elsewhere in this
>thread, one issue is Python 2 vs Python 3 (and minimum
>versions). Within Python 2.*, Python 2.6 onwards is broadly
>compatible with Python 3.*, and there's a well-known common
>subset that works in both languages.
>
>To what extent would this complicate bootstrap? (I don't think
>so, in that it would appear to be just an external build-time
>dependency on the build machine).
>
>Would this make it harder for people to build GCC? It's one
>more dependency, but CPython is widely available and relatively
>easy to build. (I don't have experience of doing bring-up of a
>new architecture, though).
Hello,
I have recently been working on bringing up a new Debian port for
the riscv64 architecture from scratch, so I would like to add
some of my personal experiences here.
Adding a dependency on python for building gcc would make life
for distribution porters quite a bit harder. There are a bunch
of packages that are more or less essential for a modern Linux
distribution but at the same time extremely difficult to properly
cross-build. For a distribution porter trying to bootstrap a new
architecture, this means that one has to resort to native
building sooner or later, i.e. one has to build native toolchain
packages and then work forward from there. During the bootstrap
process it is often necessary to break dependency cycles and
natively rebuild toolchain packages with different build-profiles
enabled, or to build newer versions of the same toolchain packages
with bugfixes for the new architecture.
A dependency on python would mean that to be able to do a native
rebuild of the toolchain one would need a native python. The
problem here is that python has an enormous number of transitive
build-dependencies and not all of them are easily cross-buildable,
i.e. one needs a native compiler to build some of them in a
bootstrap scenario. This can lead to a catch-22-style situation
where one would need a native python package and its dependencies
for natively building the gcc package and a native gcc package
for building (some of) the dependencies of the python package.
With awk we don't have this problem as in contrast to python awk
doesn't pull in any dependencies that aren't required by gcc
anyway. From a distro porter's point of view I would therefore
appreciate very much if it would be possible to avoid adding a
python dependency to the gcc build process.
Regards,
Karsten
P.S.: I am not subscribed to the list, so it would be nice
if you could CC me on replies.
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