Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] A native scheme install

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 04:15:13PM +0100, Michele La Monaca wrote:
> > Doesn't this create a bootstrapping problem while installing Chicken?
> > Chicken needs a working install to install the runtime system, but
> > your install needs the runtime system to be able to run...
> 
> If the build succeeds you have your runtime system under your feet. If
> the build fails you've got nothing to install.

On many systems this requires extra jumping through hoops like messing
with LD_LIBRARY_PATH to make it find the runtime library when it's not
in the installed location yet.  Or building this install program
statically.

Also important: What happens in a cross-build environment?

I can't tell if it works because you didn't provide a patch for the
Makefiles to make the build system use this new program.  Perhaps I'm
just seeing problems that don't exist!

> > This would be nice to have, indeed.  But at what cost?
> 
> It does work, or it doesn't. I don't see any associated cost. Am I
> missing anything?

Extra maintenance (more code) and extra complexity related to
bootstrapping (or not, see above).  In any case, it's a more involved
build process.

> > This seems unneccessary to me.  A BSD install simply always overwrites
> > a file (unless -b is given and it will unconditionally backup the file).
> 
> Correct. Not strictly necessary, but I would prefer to have that
> feature (not overwriting a file if already installed and identical to
> the source) rather than not.

This incurs a performance penalty in the most common case (when installing
fresh or upgrading), adds more code and doesn't have a noticeable semantic
difference I can see.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx