[pypy-dev] bootstrapping issues

[David Ascher]

Marc Recht wrote:

>> There is the idea of not using make/configure/automake
>
> Not using automake/autoconf is IMHO "The Right Thing".
>
>> but a simple understandable debuggable (read: python based)
>> build environment.  IOW words the number of dependencies
>> for building Minimal Python should also be minimal.
>
> Why not using make ? It's installed on any system that has a c 
> compiler, so it doesn't add another dependency. IMHO we could use it 
> to bootstrap the core and then go on with something Python based 
> (using the bootstrapped core).

Make, Configure etc. aren't "really" portable to Windows.  It's hard to 
know when you've written a portable makefile.  Make doesn't scale. Make 
is error-prone, etc.  There are lots of problems with Make, but this 
isn't really the place for that discussion.

See pages like:

    http://sc-archive.codesourcery.com/sc_build
    
http://sc-archive.codesourcery.com/entries/build/Machina/machina-appendix.html
    http://www.scons.org/doc/HTML/scons-python10/t1.html
    http://www.a-a-p.org/

--david