Re: Hamster

On Mar 30, 2004 at 11:11 +0300, Asko Kauppi wrote:
> What's wrong with GPL?  You're using gcc (which is GPL) so why couldn't 
> the make be. Actually, you're using gnu make, right?
> 
> You're not the first to criticize this, but either I don't get the 
> issue or there is some misconception here. I'm careful to exclude any 
> GPL from LuaX but can still use GPL tools to build it..
> 
> Of course, Hamster being GPL is just my preliminary decision, and can 
> be changed. "Just for fun" I wouldn't change it without a proper 
> reasoning.

On Posix systems, the user is expected to already have a compiler and
make command installed, separately from luacheia.  With autotools, the
only absolute external dependencies are a C compiler (not necessarily
gcc), a Posix bourne shell (not necessarily bash), and a Posix make
utility (not necessarily GNU make).  I.e. we don't have to distribute
a compiler or make or sh, which is good, and the user (in principle)
doesn't have to download anything else other than the luacheia
tarball.

However, in the case of an unusual build system, the user would either
have to download the build system separately, or we would want to be
able to include the build system source, and bootstrap it using just
sh, cc, and make.  Adding an external dependency is undesirable, and
changing the whole luacheia license to accomodate the build system is
also undesirable.

The situation is less tidy on Windows, which doesn't come with any
compiler or make utility, so we have the MinGW/MSYS dependency.  It's
not an ideal situation, but it's not too terrible either, especially
for us since it makes the Windows build environment very similar to
the Posix one.  It would be nice someday to get rid of the sh and make
dependency, and have a native .bat file or something that could
bootstrap a luacheia build using a variety of existing compilers
including MSVC/Borland/etc, but we're probably a ways off from that.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click