Re: Selective compilation

[Jim Meyering]

Henrique Almeida wrote:
>  I'm building a new libc implementation, called libposix, with a few
> volunteers. We'll begin to use a test driven development approach and
> we're considering GNU coreutils for our initial test case. I'd like to
> know if it's possible to build only small parts of coreutils, instead
> of the full package, during this initial evolution of libposix code.
> Ideally, it would be good if we were able to build only a single tool
> and its dependecies. Also, if that's not possible, maybe you could
> point other applications that would be useful to us. I'm also afraid
> that the configure script would not work with libposix in this stage.
> Is it possible to point out what are the requirements for the
> configure script ?

The programs in coreutils depend heavily on gnulib.
The parts of gnulib used in coreutils are distributed throughout the
m4/*.m4 files (which are integrated into configure), lib/* files, and
Makefile snippets.  The sources and gnulib support are intertwined
enough that separating the src/*.c code from configure-time tests
is likely to be a challenging and subtly error-prone task.