On 27.07.2018 16:31, Michael Matz wrote: > Hi, > > On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, Michael Matz wrote: > >> Using any python scripts as part of generally building GCC (i.e. where >> the generated files aren't prepackaged) will introduce a python >> dependency for distro packages. And for those distros that bootstrap a >> core cycle of packages (e.g. *SUSE) this will include python (and all >> its dependencies) into that bootstrap cycle. >> >> That will be terrible. > > Oh, and of course, I haven't read any really convincing arguments for > why python would be so much better than awk to counter the disadvantages. > > Building a compiler (especially one that regards itself as a > multi-target/host one) should have extremely few prerequisites (ideally > only a compiler and runtime for the language its written in), and I > wouldn't call a full python distro that (no matter how much people claim > that getting the necessary subset of python is mostly trivial. compiling > any random awk is trivial, especially given a compiler you already need > anyway; python is not).
that very much depends on your bootstrap system supporting staged builds. You already have to do that for glibc/gcc anyway. But yes, if you think that adding a staged python build is more complicated ... > Hell, if anything I'd say we should rewrite the awk scripts into POSIX sh > (!). I'll concede that for text processing AWK is nicer ;-) > > So, if it's only for a minor convenience of writing some text > processing scripts, no, that's not a good reason to complicate our > prerequisites. (The helper scripts in contrib/ as long as they aren't > used during GCC build can use any fancy language they want)
