Have Win DMD use gmake instead of a separate DMMake makefile?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 04:21:45PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Saturday, August 10, 2013 14:35:04 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > Is this something that would be acceptable, or does building DMD for
> > Windows need to stay as DM make?
> 
> I don't see any problem with it, but that doesn't mean that Walter
> won't.
> 
> Another suggestion that I kind of liked was to just build them all
> with a single script written in D and ditch make entirely, which would
> seriously reduce the amount of duplication across platforms. But
> that's obviously a much bigger change and would likely be much more
> controversial than simply using a more standard make.
[...]

I'm all for ditching make.  What about this:

- We write a small D app that automatically scans all dependencies and
  generates a shell script / .BAT file / whatever the target platform
  uses, that contains compile commands that builds DMD and a make
  replacement written in D. This is for bootstrapping.

- The make replacement written in D can then be used to rebuild DMD,
  build druntime, Phobos, etc..

The first step is what makes this all work, 'cos you'll need to already
have a working D compiler before step 2 is usable. (Either that, or ship
binaries, but then you'll get people complaining about their platform of
choice not being supported, the binaries being incompatible with their
quirky installation of system libraries, etc..) Once DMD is built, we
can junk the script / .BAT file and use the D make-replacement from then
on.


T

-- 
People tell me that I'm skeptical, but I don't believe it.