On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Bryan C. Warnock wrote:
> On Friday 07 December 2001 08:43 am, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> > Funny you should mention that, because Perl's Configure does things in
> > order determined by 'Dependency-ish rules, a la make'. Configure is
> > indeed built in just the way you suggest.
> Except, of course, for being one big honking file.
That's a mere implementation detail :-). (Though one that's admittedly
quite intimidating!) It isn't one big file until the very very end step.
There's no reason it couldn't be a file that simply called a series of
tiny scripts
#!/bin/sh
. U/intro
. U/find-shell
. U/cmdline
. U/find-hints
etc., except that it would then be even slower than it already is.
(Probably not a significant effect now, but it would have been when
Configure was originally designed.)
The key idea is that the pumpkin holder runs 'make' ONCE to determine the
dependencies and record the proper order to run the units in a file.
End-users don't have to redetermine that order every time they build perl.
> I thought Brent was
> asking how to determine configure order with a number of distinct, smaller
> configs.
I'm not sure that It'd prove too useful in the long run, but I'd do it
exactly the same way -- with 'make'. Specifically, if this were
metaconfig, I'd run metaconfig, hand-edit its 'Wanted' file (which is a
list of known symbols that it found) to pick the particular 'distinct,
smaller config' I had in mind, and then re-run C< metaconfig -w > which
would then "trust" my hand-edited 'Wanted' file and generate a Configure
script for the subset of features I selected.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
