[ECOS] Re: Improvement to makemakefile script

[Jonathan Larmour]

Thomas Koeller wrote:
> Doing eCos development requires a number of different things to be
> installed - gcc, GNU binutils, Tcl/Tk, even more exotic stuff like
> wxWindows. Building the HTML documentation requires jade, style
> sheets, maybe even TeX and some macro packages.

And every package you mention is portable to many hosts, and doesn't 
require bash. Most are based on autoconf/automake which go to 
extraordinary lengths to a) be absolutely portable on many many systems; 
and b) avoid dependent packages having to worry about portability.

Automake wouldn't need to exist if every package could just say "use GNU 
make".

> Now bash is a pretty standard program that virtually everybody has,
> or could easily install.

Only easily if they have root on their machine. You could invoke 
makemakefile directly with bash, but then we have to think about every 
subshell and script it runs, which would probably revert to running sh.

> I just can't see the point in taking any
> pains, however small, just because there may be a remote possibility
> of someone wanting to do eCos development on a system that has all
> those software packages, but no bash.

Building host tools is not something we expect people to have to do much, 
and there are the command line tools anyway - in fact that's one of the 
big reasons they exist... to allow eCos to be used on systems the 
graphical tool can't be ported to.

But building documentation is something anyone may have to do - and we 
desperately don't want to discourage, and it depends on jade, which is bad 
enough, but I see no reason to make it worse and make a big long list of 
dependencies.

> I apologize for being this penetrant, but, as you rightfully stated,
> it is a question of principle, and I'd like to point out that one
> generally accepted principle of open source software development is
> to build upon the work of others where it makes your work easier,
> and not to re-invent the wheel. I'd say we should follow this principle,
> too, don't you agree?

Very few other open source packages use that principle - most value 
portability over developer convenience. The ones that don't are generally 
intended for a single OS anyway, e.g. Linux.

Jifl
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eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
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