Re: [Chicken-hackers] C lost -D on chicken-install

[Peter Bex]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 08:07:03PM +0200, Jörg F. Wittenberger wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> apparently chicken-install lost the -D <feature> switch.
> 
> To put it mildly: This worries me a lot.

Hi Jörg,

I didn't even know the old chicken-install even had that.  What do you
use it for?  It doesn't seem very discoverable to me (for users), and if
an egg is installed as a dependency of another egg, what the consequences
are for the -D option; should it be passed on to the dependency or not?

Note that "csc" and "chicken" still both support -D, there are some
eggs which use feature detection in their build script and then pass -D
to csc in order to convey this information to the code.

> Now everyone will be looking for the best way how to bring this back.

"everyone" is a bit strong; we already have 144 eggs that have been ported,
some of which are quite complex, and so far I haven't heard this complaint.
Note that CHICKEN 4 had 807 eggs.

> Or at least learn the answer the big question: Why the hell this is
> considered a bad idea and how to bring the functionality back anyway once
> you know what you are doing.

If you're using this to set build-time options, perhaps environment
variables are a suitable replacement?  But if it really is important
for your use case we could of course just bring back -D (unless anyone
objects; I don't feel very strongly about it either way, as I've never
used it).

Cheers,
Peter

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