On 5/14/07, Shawn W. <address@hidden> wrote:
On May 14, 2007, at 10:24 AM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
> Ok Mac OS X users, what say you? Should we tie your hands for your
> own good, or give you the freedom to cut off your own fingers?
>
I don't care about static linking.
I've yet to hear any Mac user care about static linking. Better speak up if you do!
I'm starting to favor killing all static builds on both Autoconf and CMake, even though Autoconf currently gets it right. This would (1) cut build times on Mac OS X in half. That's the primary benefit from my standpoint. (2) Prevent any possibility of weird bugs due to Mac issues. (3) It sets a uniform expectation for Chicken users on Mac OS X. As opposed to shipping
libchicken.a and libchicken-s.a, which would invite variance in how people use Chicken under Mac OS X.
For simplicity, I would also change libchicken-boot and chicken-boot to be dynamically linked on all platforms, not just Mac OS X. Originally I made the bootstrap static for fear of "complications" with a given system's dynamic linking. But, I've never observed dynamic linking complications in all the time that CMake has been tested. Peter Keller's post also seems to indicate that static linking is the case more likely to cause problems.
What would be nice is an OS X
framework for the chicken runtime. It'd be a lot easier to distribute
to people who want to run a program written in chicken without having
to install the full thing (Compiler, interpreter, runtime libraries,
etc.).
CMake doesn't have framework support. See
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:MacOSX_FrameworksThe issue is known but isn't getting attention. Bill Hoffman is interested in moving forwards on the issue, but could use prodding and assistance from the Mac community.
Does Autoconf have framework support?
Universal binary support to go along with that would be nice
too. The latter is easy to do. (Add '-arch i386 -arch ppc' to the
cflags used by the chicken compiler, and I /think/ everything will
work automagically. I'll test that.)
This can be done, but we really need a person with a Mac who's interested in using CMake. I can advise but I can't test this issue, I have no Mac. An interested person could put the issue into the bug tracker and CC: bvanevery.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every