[Expat-discuss] RFC: unitool -> universal toolchain instead of autoshit

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Greg Stein <gstein at lyra.org> wrote:

Hi,

> The autoconf/libtool scripts work just fine for Expat. We dropped
> automake a long time (the worst of the bunch).
> 
> I'm not sure how a switch would benefit Expat or its users.

Well, autoconf often enough does *not* work. 

For example it doesn't pass -E to grep when using extendet regex,
which breaks with slightly older grep (2.4.x). This ends up in 
configure thinking you dont have gnu ld and so refuses to build 
an shared library. 

Why the hell does an plain package, which ig. is platform 
independent, have to cope with platform dependend toolchain 
commands ?! Why can't there simply be *one* reliable command set 
for *every platform* ?

And that's exactly where I want to do with unitool:
We have *one* package which encapsulates all platform 
dependent commands behind some, well engineered and reliable 
fontend interface and is ported *once* per platform. All those 
common things like how to run several tools, what binfmt to use, 
how to find certain imported packages, cope with crosscompile and 
sysroot, etc, etc, are all hidden behind unitool.

Evrything unitool-based packages have to do is, to simply throw the 
input files in front of unitool's feet and call it "build this stuff".

This also makes locating and fixing build problems much easier, ie. 
the DESTDIR issue (remember: i posted a fix half a year ago ...) is 
then simply irrelevant to expat developers, since unitool handles it, 
and everyone knows how to instruct unitool.


cu
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