gcc: cleaning up top level config

[Kai Henningsen]

alexr@spies.com (Alex Rosenberg)  wrote on 12.11.02 in <B9F6AF3B.49709%alexr@spies.com>:

> collaborate with; I'm not sure why I bothered to build a patch. Do you
> people even realize what a PITA it is to produce diff output in MPW? How

Actually, I've done it often enough and didn't notice any particular  
difficulty - works exactly as under Unix. Of course, you *do* need to have  
the MPW port of GNU diff - I have no longer any idea where I got that,  
it's been ages since I last used that particular setup, I don't use a Mac  
currently.

Usually much preferrable to MPW's CompareText or however their mangled  
variant of diff was named.

What is much more irritating is that MPW doesn't have system(). MPW make  
doesn't run programs *at all*, it creates a script file. (Which is also  
why you cannot port GNU make to get around the problems. Or bash. Or  
anything else that depends on subprocesses.)

Only when trying to port a larger project do you realize how much a  
typical nontrivial build process relies on running subprocesses, and what  
a gross PITA it is to do without.

If anyone wanted to do the MPW using world a *BIG* favour, they'd  
implement some version of system(). It *should* be possible, but I don't  
really know how deep you'd need to dig into the MPW runtime ... note that  
you do not need any kind of parallel execution, just stack-like start a  
subprocess, run it, end it, continue main process. That much gives you the  
option to use *lots* of useful Unix tools that are otherwise plain  
impossible, such as make or bash.

> about the fact that MPW is built around the microcomputer concept that an
> indent level is always equal to a tab, yet ya'll are still stuck with 8
> character tabs thanks to some dumb terminal nobody can even name anymore and
> you have rigid formatting rules that pretty much require the use of emacs?

All I can say is, huh?!


MfG Kai