Re: [Tinycc-devel] Push reproducible builds script? (for windows)

[grischka]

avih wrote:
>  
>
>     > On Wednesday, September 27, 2017 9:30 AM, grischka <address@hidden> wrote:
>  
>
>  > May I suggest something:  Why don't you guys combine your knowledge>  and 
> personal preferences and apply it to our standard Makefile instead> of adding each 
> your own scripts?
> I don't disagree that it would be nice to have one place which maintains the work of 
> "create the win32 distributions (32/64)", and preferably it can run on any 
> system/OS, and be reproducible.
>
> I was attempting to improve the standard makefile some time ago with roughly 
> that in mind, and specifically the cross builds. You can see my list of commits 
> (haven't pushed new ones for over a year) here: 
> https://github.com/avih/tinycc/commits/drafts
>
> However, as hard as I tried, I could not keep my patches up to date with your 
> (grishka) ever changing-everything commits once in a while, especially those at 
> Makefile and configure.
> And since I didn't consider my patches production ready to push, and I couldn't 
> maintain and rebase them, I dropped this work, and concentrated my efforts on 
> my reproducible build script.
>
> I suspect (though for sure cannot know) that win32/Makefile is not integrated to the main 
> Makefile for similar reasons. After all, why would one need win32/Makefile if the main 
> one would "just work" for this need?

Well however the fact that someone at some point in time didn't
manage to make something work with what we already have doesn't
count as an argument that we add everybody's convenience scripts
to support their personal workarounds.

What could count is whether it maybe implements a new principle
that has enough advantages worth to maintain a new file.

And there I don't see advantages that are interesting enough for a
wider audience.  There are some nifty features and there may be
some audience but to my estimation it's rather unlikely large enough
to keep the script up to date in future.

For same reason I also consider to remove the "cygwin" Makefile.
The instructions how to use it say "Install Base, gcc, make".  Okay,
but this is not nothing, and then why not tell users to get the right
compiler in the first place:  "Install Base, mingw-gcc, make"  and
then to use normal configure & make.

Christian, do you think you could launch the setup program of your
cygwin eventually and mark the mingw32 cross compiler as "to be installed"
and then see what you can do with it and our normal configure && meke?

The cross-gcc will be something like i686-w64-mingw32-gcc, therefor
you will probably need
      ./configure --cross-prefix=i686-w64-mingw32-
      make
      make test

The prefix may vary with cygwin versions.

--- grischka


> I did manage to push to mob or promote some changes, such as supporting out of 
> tree builds, for which I'm grateful.
>
> > As I see it, both, Christian's win32/Makefile (labeled "for cygwin")
> > as well as Avi's suggested reproducible builds script really are very
> > similar:
> Indeed they are. They use the same approach and with the same goal. The main 
> differences I could identify off hand would be:
> - win32/Makefile requires [g]make. my script needs only a shell and a compiler.
> - win32/Makefile runs only on cygwin (and confirmed msys2 too), but not on *nix 
> systems (tested ubuntu), mine runs everywhere I tested - which is a lot.- My 
> script calculates and prints a signature to confirm reproducibility.- My script 
> makes an explicit effort to not require features which are not available 
> everywhere, such as realpath, symlinks, and few more, and instead implements 
> good enough variants as posix shell functions.
> - My script only puts new files at the output dir and doesn't leave traces at 
> the main dir[s]. It also creates a temp work dir inside the output dir and 
> deletes it once done. As you can tell, I'm a big fan of out-of-tree builds...
> My goal was to allow building the same binary everywhere (even osx or bsd) and 
> with the same tool (a single script), with the minimal supported setup being 
> busybox on windows and tcc itself as a bootstrap CC .
> Therefore I find most of the diffs meaningful.
> If you agree with this goal, then I cannot see this happen with the main 
> configure and Makefile. I did also try to use a win32 make.exe within busybox 
> and do the normal procedure. I made some progress, but there are a lot of 
> roadblocks and a lot of missing features, and eventually I dropped it and took 
> the script approach.
> I also think it won't be fair to limit the tools which the main configure && 
> make use just to allow building with a minimal setup.
>
>
>
> > What do you guys think?
> I'm willing to help with such effort, but It will only be usable with a full 
> blown development environment, which not everyone has.
> I think the reproducible shell script would still have value on such case, for 
> the little people :), and for its simplicity and relatively bullet proof 
> implementation (famous last words ;) ).
>
>
>