Re: [f-cpu] about the ongoing work for the "stable" release, autoconf ?

[Yann Guidon <whygee@f-cpu.org>]

hello !

it's good to see nicO writing again on the list,
i wondered if you were still in Berlin :-)

nicO wrote:
> So i understood that Whygee will make a good distribution.

or more precisely : a package that should be rather ok and not
too dirty. Until now, Michael and me have "published" our files
but this time i wanted to make sure someone else could use it.
My further developments will be based on this package, i hope
that others will be able to work on it.

> I know he try to use m4 tools. But what about using automake/autoconf ?
> It's very powerfull and much more "standard".

IIRC autoconf uses m4. We use it lile a "super cpp".
OTOH i can't know every tool. m4 is enough currently, we don't
use a lot of its possibilities and it fits our needs : there
is no need for something else that is even more complex, more
powerful and that we would have to learnt. Maintainability is
easier when a reduced number of simple tools is used, right ? :-)
Finally, this is not the "usual" kind of source code : there are
both C/flex/bison and VHDL files. Concerning the flex/bison/c sources,
they are used to generate binaries for the VHDL simulated CPU,
this is not a "complex/heavy" program and it should run anywhere
gcc is installed, because i probably use malloc/fread/fwrite
as sole external references. If the file doesn't compile it is
easy to find why and there is no autoconf file to modify, only
a very small script (4 lines ?).

The VHDL compilation/synthesis part is more complex but 
i know no autoconf/automake version for VHDL. We can detect
tools and compile/simulate with a set of scipts (even probably
Makefiles) but all the functions done by autoconf (detection of
machine-dependent parameters such as size of ints, compiler
version etc) has close to no meaning in VHDL and on top of that,
we use the "least common denominator" approach so we are sure that
the VHDL sources will compile/run "as is", with no modification.

Of course, all this rants hides/means that i don't know how to
use autoconf ;-)

> nicO
WHYGEE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PS: nicO, is it possible for you (or Cedric) to tell us
about your Berlin trip ? i'm excited to hear it !
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