*.exports in distro bundle, use of Perl on Windows (was: Re: make_export.awk)

[Greg Stein <gs...@lyra.org>]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:28:07AM -0800, rbb@covalent.net wrote:
> > > I dislike this idea.  I realize (now) that awk is available on Windows,
> > > but Perl is already required to build Apache on Windows, and all of a
> > > sudden we are going to add the requirement of awk too.  Why?  We already
> > > require Perl on every platform when building Apache, but we do not
> > > currently require awk.
> > 
> >     Is Perl required on Unix as well?
> 
> Currently, yes it is.  It is required for the .exports file, and it is
> required for using APXS.  In genreal, we expect most developers to have
> Perl on their machines, but we will not require users to have it.

Well, for the .exports, we're talking about switching that to awk right now,
no? :-) And APXS is optional. At the moment, we don't really need Perl
except for the exports file and the stuff the OtherBill introduced just a
few days ago for the install (which could easily be awk or sed or whatever).

> >     There are still a substantial amount of platforms which don't
> >     ship with Perl (most SysV-derivatives, including Tru64,
> >     UnixWare, OpenServer). Apache 1.3 did not require Perl and
> >     one of the design goals of the Apache 2.0 build system was
> >     that it shall work without Perl.
> > 
> >     Has this changed?
> 
> When I originally wrote the buildexports stuff, we didn't require Perl to
> build Apache, because that file could be generated once and just bundled
> with Apache.  With the move to create those files during the build steps,
> we now require Perl just to build.  I think the best solution is to move
> that step back to the buildconf script, because that allows us to bundle
> these files with the packages.

We can make *.exports at release-time and bundle them into the distro. The
files won't be regenerated since they already exists.

Switching to awk would lower the bar *if* it somehow gets regenerated.

Keeping it in the make step is important for the developers. When the
headers change, it is nice to have the exports automatically updated. When
Jeff took out some of the address lookup stuff, it got rebuilt for me and
everything was happy. No re-running buildconf just to get rid of it.

>...
> >     Cannot we port the Perl stuff to awk as well?
> 
> It turns out there are no other Perl scripts, except for on
> Windows.  Regardless, OtherBill made a decision to not use awk or sed in
> the step that modifies the default config file.  I really think we need to
> find out why he made that decision.  If he chose not to use awk for a
> reason, then we can not force him to use awk on Windows now.

It was for simple expediency. All that the code does is a search/replace.

We could use sed or awk or a teeny C program to do that. No need for Perl.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Re: *.exports in distro bundle

[Greg Stein <gs...@lyra.org>]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 12:36:55PM -0800, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:28:07AM -0800, rbb@covalent.net wrote:
>...
> > When I originally wrote the buildexports stuff, we didn't require Perl to
> > build Apache, because that file could be generated once and just bundled
> > with Apache.  With the move to create those files during the build steps,
> > we now require Perl just to build.  I think the best solution is to move
> > that step back to the buildconf script, because that allows us to bundle
> > these files with the packages.
> 
> We can make *.exports at release-time and bundle them into the distro. The
> files won't be regenerated since they already exists.
>...
> Keeping it in the make step is important for the developers. When the
> headers change, it is nice to have the exports automatically updated. When
> Jeff took out some of the address lookup stuff, it got rebuilt for me and
> everything was happy. No re-running buildconf just to get rid of it.

I just thought of something. Nothing precludes us from building *.exports in
buildconf (e.g. in prep for a release). The make step remains for developers
when they update the header files.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/