groan: installation

[Adam Megacz]

Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> writes:
> You're not seriously suggesting that in order to build GCJ
> people have to first build Kaffe?

Only people wanting to bootstrap it on a platform that doesn't have a
free-as-in-beer JVM (or those who don't want to use such software for
religious reasons).

Yes, I am serious about this.


> But requiring Ant to build GCJ does not seem to make sense, I think.

Make is written in C. =)

Actually, this raises an interesting point: how do you bootstrap gcc
on a system without make or a C compiler?  Make requires [g]cc, and
gcc requires make!


> Perhaps when Ant can handle all the functionality of autoconf and
> automake as well, and I hear more reports about people using it for
> complex non-Javat projects, then perhaps it might be worth considering

I think the biggest reason people get frustrated with ant is because
it doesn't ship with the <sh> task, so you can't use the shell like
you do in Make.  The Ant developers chose this default because they
want to use the same build.xml on Windows and UNIX systems, which is
certainly a noble ideal, but IMHO this cripples ant and makes people
think that it is cumbersome.

Using the <sh> task means that you can only build on POSIXy systems,
but suddenly you wind up with the best of both worlds (make and ant).
At least for me, it's absolutely been worth it.

  - a


-- 
"Through your rags I see your vanity"  -- Socrates