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From: Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Python recompile
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2025 09:53:37 -0000 (UTC)
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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.