[pypy-dev] PyPy broken! What's up?

[holger krekel]

Hi Chris, 

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 05:45 +0200, Christian Tismer wrote:
> in Hildesheim, I struggled for many hours to get my new marshal
> module to compile and integrate. Finally, after removing all
> problematic things where the annotator or the rtyper complained
> about, I figured out that the current PyPy SVN version did
> not compile at all.
> 
> Today, I tried again, after I brought marshal some quality levels
> further. Still, PyPy does not translate, neither on Windows ( with
> my patches of course) nor on Debian Linux.

I tried to translate yesterday afternoon (on linux) and 
it worked.  From looking at the commits today i guess 
that the integration of the _sre module triggered 
some problems (which i haven't analysed yet). 

If i leave out the _sre module but leave the marshal 
included then it fails as well. 

If i leave out the _sre and marshal module and 
inhibit importing of the marshal multimethod 
in std/model.py then PyPy translates.  So 
i committed changes along these lines to make
the default trunk translate again: Revision 15538 
should be translateable (on linux). 

> The property to be translatable to a C binary is much more
> valuable than it is treated. I would really like to see some
> notation of that, like tagging a PyPy version as translatable.
> I think we are lacking something, here.

Well, i guess you know that we have the "working from snapshot" 
scheme which we used up until the hildesheim2 sprint? 
On the sprint we discussed whether to continue to work from such
a snapshot or whether to stay with the trunk.  We decided 
that we want to try working from the trunk, especially
since annotation is/was not producing any SomeObjects
and is relatively fast.  Keeping a snapshot is 
extra work but maybe we have to go back using it. 

> Due to this fact, I will now carelessly check marshal in,
> without disabling it. This has cost Samuele and me way too many
> hours, although I figured out that PyPy was not translatable
> at all, at that time. (Yes, we had many bugs and removed them).

Sorry, I am not completely sure what you refer to.  That
PyPy was not translateable in an unmodified-trunk version on
sunday? 

> Please, I want a principal decision about this. Either breaking
> PyPy must be forbidden, or check-ins must be tagged whether they
> do compile or not. Random results about this are not acceptable
> for me, because this takes very much time.

We all want robust translation.  But it's irritating that 
you seem to take the position of a frustrated PyPy customer
although you are part of the very developing group that tries
to bring PyPy to an alpha stage.  

    holger