On 07/19/2018 10:20 PM, Karsten Merker wrote: > 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.
Hi. The problematic is quite covered in this thread. You're not CC, so please take a look: https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-07/msg00233.html So for your use case, cross compilation of python (without fancy modules that have dependencies) should work for you to make a transition into native distribution. Martin > > 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. >
