Re: Extension packaging

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 08:26:12PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 10 May 2022 20:21:10 +0300
> > From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> > Cc: mcollado2011@gmail.com, pjfarley3@earthlink.net, bug-gawk@gnu.org
> > 
> > If you envision the need to install in a non-standard directory, you
> > can provide a configure-time switch for that, and leave the default at
> > what makes sense for users.  I think.
> 
> And one more comment: having to use a separate script for installing
> the built libraries is a problematic solution, because users will not
> expect that.  They expect "make install" to DTRT, as it does with any
> other package we build for using on our systems.  A separate script
> will need to be documented, you need to rely on users to read that
> documentation and understand it, and then to invoke the script.  And
> that's even before we talk about the language in which that script
> will be written, and the complications with running it on non-Posix
> platforms...

The script would not be for installing the libraries; the script
would download, build, test, and install the libraries. The goal
is to provide something comparable to CPAN, although this will likely
be considerably dumber.

As for languages, I can't really imagine using anything other than Bourne shell
and gawk. If we don't have a shell and gawk available, then I'm pretty
sure everything is completely hopeless.

In theory, the script will be simple enough that somebody can figure out to run
"gawkext -i json" by perhaps running gawkext with out any arguments or "gawkext
-h" or "gawkext --help". I have learned from this experience that one can't
rely upon people to read instructions, so there's not a lot of benefit in
writing them. :-)

Regards,
Andy