Re: Python recompile

On 05/03/2025 22:08, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 09:10:21 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
 

Frankly any build system that has a 35K configure file needs revisiting.
No package is so complex as to require that much setup.

 Feel free to “revisit” it, and let us know what can be dropped.

Pretty much all of it? Most of it seems to be about determining system characteristics, something you don't need to repeat for every application you build on /the same machine/.
Besides, what is the point of determining whether a C implementation supports 'stdio.h' for example?  If it's not present, you're pretty much ****ed anyway, and you will quickly find that out without needing a 35,000 line to script to tell you (about 600 pages if printed out).
In any case, the configure script is not run for every incremental build, but there is nothing to stop the C implementation changing or being deleted in the meantime.
It is utterly pointless.
(I once had an open source project with a similarly large configure script. I managed to run it on Linux under VirtualBox; it took 5 minutes, most of which was running that script.
It wouldn't run on pure Windows, but I managed to figure out what C files were involved, and was able to get those compiled more or less with my C compiler.
Building that program from scratch on Windows took one second, on the same machine. No thanks to that stupid script.)

 The code doesn’t write itself, you know.

The configure file doesn't write the application code. It's designed to consume machine resources, plus ensure you can't directly build the app on Windows.