[LLVMdev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Upcoming Build System Changes

[Alek Paunov]

Hi David,

On 28.10.2011 13:05, David Chisnall wrote:
> I disagree there.  Perl is pretty much guaranteed to be installed on any UNIXish system.  Even FreeBSD, which has removed it from the base system, tends to install the Perl package by default.  In contrast, a lot of the machines I use don't have Python installed.  I need to install it if I'm doing LLVM development because it's needed for the tests, but needing it just to build seems like massive overkill.

It is possible that you are right about the overall index of "presence". 
Just to mention that in Fedora derivatives (RedHat, CentOS, maybe 35-50% 
of Linux dev stations - I don't know) Python is guaranteed because of 
yum (the package manager).

>
> That said, if the information required for the build is going to be made explicit, maybe this isn't such a problem, as other tools can be written to parse it and run the build.

Absolutely - once the generators are prototyped and tested in Python, if 
current Perl (presence) > Python's, they can be easily ported to Perl.

Kind Regards,
Alek