Re: Some wild considerations and a question

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Dienstag, den 20.10.2020, 18:26 +0200 schrieb David Kastrup:
> Jonas Hahnfeld <hahnjo@hahnjo.de> writes:
> 
> > I don't want to digress into this topic right now (P.S. the reply got
> > longer than I initially anticipated), but the scripts have a much
> > narrower focus: they mostly compile native binaries (except for
> > Windows via mingw) instead of cross-compiling for all targets. In my
> > experience from helping with GUB in the past year, that's the main
> > source of complexity for usage and maintenance. Moreover, this choice
> > also outright prevents 64-bit executables for macOS because of Apple's
> > restrictions with regard to their toolchain.
> > 
> > I'm open to reconsider the choice of sh-scripts, but GUB aims at doing
> > just too much (a package manager for building arbitrary packages for
> > various targets; where we only do LilyPond to a handful) by using a
> > too powerful language and architecture (Python 2 with dynamic
> > dependency resolution and generic interfaces to various build
> > systems). I think we should learn from that and choose a design that
> > avoids the pitfalls.
> 
> To be fair, GUB could have become a significant part of the GNU compiler
> toolchain which would have vindicated its complexity, and at one point
> of time it was more or less intended for that.
> 
> I have not pushed it in that direction since I never was able to get
> dependable information about the legal status of our MacOSX port's
> toolkit.  While it was clear that the conditions of the 64bit toolkit
> precluded its use, the respective conditions for the 32bit kit we used
> just were no longer to be found and it was not overly clear just what
> version was involved here.  If this would have been replaced by some
> OpenDarwin components (but we had nobody to work on that, partly a
> hen-and-egg problem), this might have been different.
> 
> And with the basic "let's not look too closely here" status of the
> MacOSX toolkit, extending its reach would have been asking others to
> embrace the potential trouble that we were in ourselves.

For my own reading pleasure, do you have links where this was
discussed? I mean, I don't see your name in the GUB repo so I'm not
sure what "I have not pushed it" means.

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