On Apr 14, 2007, at 7:18 PM, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 06:41:19PM -0400, James Keenan wrote:
I am trying to determine the purpose of a certain block of code in
Configure.pl. In the most recent version in trunk, we find:
...
My questions are:
1. If you've already configured, why would you want to add another
step before calling 'make'?
2. Does anybody actually use Configure.pl in this way, and to what
purpose?
I can't speak for others, but I use this frequently with
"Configure.pl --step=gen::languages". This allows regeneration
of the per-language makefiles (e.g., languages/perl6/Makefile)
without having to go through the entire configure/rebuild
process for all of Parrot.
That's a useful example.
Would it then be fair to say that this block is a Parrot developer's
tool rather than something inherent to the Parrot installation
process (where that process is thought of as a configure-build-test-
install sequence)?
And if it is a developer's tool, would it be better off in a separate
script from Configure.pl?
I raise these questions because, as I write tests for Configure.pl
and the modules underlying it, I need to know whether the test is
meant to be run when the filesystem is in a 'pre-Configure.pl' state
or in the 'post-Configure.pl/pre-make' state.
Thanks for your rapid response!
