[Tack-devel] CVS & the new build system

[David G. <dg...@co...>]

Good news, everyone! Head of CVS builds with the new build system! On
NetBSD, too.

The build system uses a seperate tool wot I wrote called Prime Mover,
which is a kind of make replacement designed for very complex dependency
trees. It has its own SVN repository on pm.sf.net, but is deployed in
the ACK and LLgen as a single shell script executable called pm; when
deployed, it has no dependencies other than a C compiler called cc.

This should in no way be considered a release, but it should be
sufficiently complete to be useful for playing with. You get: C (ANSI &
K&R), the full set of code generators and assemblers, opt, and the ack
driver, and a few utilities. You can use it to compile code for the
various targets, but there are no libraries or linkers yet.

Prerequisites: you will first need to download and install LLgen 1.0.2
from the ACK website.

To build the ACK: check out head-of-CVS of the ACK module. Look at and
edit config.pm, although it shouldn't be necessary. Then do:

=2E/pm configure
=2E/pm

(The configure stage should go away eventually.) (On the BSDs, I found I
had to do 'ulimit -n 128' first, or else the build process would run out
of file descriptors.) This will build everything that's done so far and
put it all into a staging area, which by default is
/tmp/ack-temp/staging; eventually this will be tarred up and copied to
the destination installation directory, but for now it should be set up
to run directly from there. (Repeating that last ./pm will do an
incremental build.)

To test:

cd /tmp/ack-temp/staging
cat >test.c <<EOF
int foo(int i) {
return i+1;
}
EOF
bin/ack -v -O -ansi test.c -c.s -marm

(Replace the -marm with -mi386, or -m6500, or -mm68020...)

The build tool is currently still under development and so is rough
around the edges and very undocumented --- it should smooth down
eventually. Incidentally, NetBSD appears not to have an 'arch' command
--- what's the portable equivalent? Its absence causes warnings to be
generated by pm, although it still seems to work...

--=20
+- David Given --McQ-+ "You cannot truly appreciate _Atlas Shrugged_
|  dg...@co...    | until you have read it in the original Klingon."
| (dg...@ta...) | --- Sea Wasp on r.a.sf.w
+- www.cowlark.com --+