Re: [RFC] Adding Python as a possible language and it's usage

[Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, Michael Matz wrote:

> Using any python scripts as part of generally building GCC (i.e. where 
> the generated files aren't prepackaged) will introduce a python 
> dependency for distro packages.  And for those distros that bootstrap a 
> core cycle of packages (e.g. *SUSE) this will include python (and all 
> its dependencies) into that bootstrap cycle.
> 
> That will be terrible.

Oh, and of course, I haven't read any really convincing arguments for 
why python would be so much better than awk to counter the disadvantages.

Building a compiler (especially one that regards itself as a 
multi-target/host one) should have extremely few prerequisites (ideally 
only a compiler and runtime for the language its written in), and I 
wouldn't call a full python distro that (no matter how much people claim 
that getting the necessary subset of python is mostly trivial.  compiling 
any random awk is trivial, especially given a compiler you already need 
anyway; python is not).

Hell, if anything I'd say we should rewrite the awk scripts into POSIX sh 
(!).  I'll concede that for text processing AWK is nicer ;-)

So, if it's only for a minor convenience of writing some text 
processing scripts, no, that's not a good reason to complicate our 
prerequisites.  (The helper scripts in contrib/ as long as they aren't 
used during GCC build can use any fancy language they want)


Ciao,
Michael.