Re: Python recompile

On Thu, 6 Mar 2025 19:21:45 -0000 (UTC)
antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) wibbled:

In comp.lang.c Muttley@dastardlyhq.org wrote:

On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 18:16:25 +0000
bart <bc@freeuk.com> wibbled:

The CPython source bundle doesn't come with any makefiles. The first
step appears to be to run a 35,000-line 'configure' script. Part of its

 
Frankly any build system that has a 35K configure file needs revisiting.
No package is so complex as to require that much setup. OS specific code
should be dealt with some appropriate ifdefs in the source and libraries
and linking should be a few 10s of lines.
 
Back in the day packages used to hve different preprepared Makefiles for
each system they could build on and IME that tended to work a lot better
than configure scripts that tried to figure things out on the fly.

>
I remember times when source package came with README file saying
edit this and that to configure for your system.  Typically one
had to edit Makefile and possibly something like config.h.  For

Header files should never have to be manually edited unless the person who
wrote the code didn't know wtf they were doing. #ifdef exists for a reason
and if thats not enough makefiles can always manually concat stuff into a
header.

me it worked quite well.  But those times are gone.  Most people
now do not know essential information about system they use, so
are unable to provide sensible values.  And modern programs are

Those sorts of people should just install prepackaged binaries, not be building
from source.

Per platform Makefile-s do not scale when one wants to support
multiple system and multiple configurations (there is exponential
growth of possible combinations).  And even of single configuration

See above about ifdef.

detected quite early.  For example, a lot of people try to
compile program without having a C compiler.  And when they

See above about installing binaries.

It is certainly silly when generated configure file is much
bigger than actual program code.  This happens frequently

Indeed.