Re: [Tack-devel] Update on porting effort

[<u-...@ae...>]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 06:08:54AM +0000, Carl Eric Codere via Tack-devel wrote:
> I guess its a question for the current maintainers now:
> In that case, I propose to keep system, and maybe at least in the current version have system use stdio as it is already doing now, clean it up a bit, expand it as necessary, and then when we need to support compiling on low end machines we just need to adapt system and not everything?
> 
> Is it also in the long term objectives of ACK development to run the compiler on older systems that are maybe within a minimal threshold? Not only as targets, but also as hosts? I would nice, no, not sure it its possible though?

I only qualify as a current maintainer for my Linux ackpack port, but
here follows my opinion:

Ack has its specific and not easily replaceable value of being capable
to run on constrained systems.

Of course, if other virtues (which motivate people to contribute to ack
at all?) conflict with this one, it is up to the benevolent dictator to
make a choice.

As long as such a virtue conflict is not present, I suggest to avoid
enforcing solutions heavier than ack actually needs.

The same applies to the choice of the build tools. Complex build tools
make self-hosting on constrained platforms impossible. This also
negatively affects reproducibility.

Nothing wrong with using advanced tools for the actual development and
debugging, where you change random places in the code and wish to rebuild
correctly, i.e. reflecting all build dependencies, and also very fast.

But a distribution IMHO should be always accompanied by a straightforward
script, taking paths to the needed resources explicitly (no fancy guessing),
to linearly and fully compile the software, by minimal tools. That's what
an integrator needs.

(hopefully the script would be made in a lightweight and easily available
language like Bourne shell using minimal Posix tools; not GNU make,
bash, perl, python with specific modules or alike)

Otherwise besides the usual dependency hell (not much in the case of ack)
one is faced by a deeper hell of the build tools (impossible to build
without a hardware at least 10-100-1000 times more powerful than ack needs
and without relying on 10-100-1000 times more lines of code? no, thanks! :)

Regards,
Rune