Hi Rob,
Rob Landley wrote:
On Tuesday 10 June 2008 02:54:32 Sam Ravnborg wrote:
(Maybe I _am_ the only person who still cares about
building on a host without perl. If I wasn't, somebody else would have
acked the patch...)
perl is pretty standard
An implementation is not the same thing as a standard. If you mean "there is
one implementation everybody uses, ala excel and Word, and even the Perl guys
can't reproduce it from scratch as parrot showed", then you're using a
different definition of the word "standard" than I am.
Or do you mean it comes preinstalled on most modern systems, the way Windows
does, and who could object to that?
I know from experience that it's an _amazing_ pain to try to cross compile the
sucker...
Ain't that the truth!
and I fail to see the benefits of avoiding it.
For embedded development I see even less benefits as I assume
any sane embedded development environment are based on a
cross-toolchain so you do the build on a high perfomance box.
Building everything for my arm board on the arm board would be a disater
for example.
I build everything for my arm board natively, on an arm system running under
qemu, calling out to the cross compiler via distcc to accelerate the limited
parts of the process that cross compiling doesn't actually break. To get to
that point, I cross compile just enough to get a native development
environment, and then I avoid cross compiling from then on because it's an
enormous source of complexity and random breakage.
Random breakage?
I did this because throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper than throwing
engineering time at the problem, because Moore's Law is on my side, and
Are you sure about that?
How well does qemu do SMP? At all?
Modern x86 and friends are getting most new performance from
more cores. A cross compile today can take advantage of those
for the most part. Your emulated system probably can't.
An order of magnitude compile time (or more) for a native build
is quite a high price to pay :-)
Regards
Greg
because I find native compiling (where possible) more straightforward and
conceptually cleaner.
Before 2.6.25, I had a complete self-bootstrapping environment with seven
packages (busybox, uClibc, make, gcc, binutils, bash, and linux). Building
glibc needs perl, if you're using a uClibc based system you may _never_ need
Perl, and could go up through Linux From Scratch and beyond to a fairly
powerful system.
I can probably natively build perl under the mini-native environment running
inside qemu, but it wasn't needed before and there really wasn't a good
reason to add it. The task being performed and the build dependency brought
in to perform it are hugely disproportionate.
Rob
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