Re: sh -> pl

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:19:59AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> David Fetter wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> I've noticed that a big hunk of our build system has gratuitous
>> dependencies on some variety of shell and on tools like sed, none
>> of which makes Windows developers feel welcome. I know people are
>> working toward a cmake or other more cross-platform toolchain. My
>> proposal is a lot more modest, and doesn't conflict with the larger
>> one. I'd like to move the above stuff to self-contained perl would
>> help to make things more cross-platform and clean up, no offense to
>> the fine authors, some pretty crufty code in there.
>
> Give us some examples.

That new version stamper calls out to sed, when perl is perfectly
capable of doing the same work itself and not spawning 30 shells in
the process.

> (If you think the sed scripts are crufty, check out some of the awk
> we use.)

Another cleanup opportunity :)

> In the case of sed, there is a standard perl replacement called psed which
> can be used in at least simple cases.
>
> But nothing we do to the make-based build system will make Windows
> developers wanting to use MSVC feel any better, so I'm not quite sure
> exactly what you would achieve.

Well, it'll wind up with a build system that's documented a lot better
than it is :)

> Is perl currently required to build from tarball? If not, you would
> be placing an additional build requirement and there may still be a
> few odd build environments that don't sport perl by default.

This is 2008, and it's silly to pretend we need to support this
"requirement" on systems where people are building Postgres.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com

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