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

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2013 09:03:12 +0200
Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-08-12 00:38, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> > Maybe my previous post didn't get the idea across clearly, so let
> > me try again. My underlying thrust was: instead of maintaining 3
> > different makefiles (or more) by hand, have a single source for all
> > of them, and write a small D program to generate posix.mak,
> > win32.mak, win64.mak, whatever, from that source.
> 
> If it's written in D it will have the same bootstrap problem.

Sort of, but...no, not really.

Since this tool would be cable of generating any platform-specific
makefile or script or whatever, and there's no reason to restrict it
to *only* generate a makefile/script for the current platform, that
means it can function much like a cross-compiler:

Suppose there's some computer DMD isn't installed on. Maybe it's even a
new platform that DMD hasn't been ported to. H.S. Teoh's tool could be
run on *any existing* D-capable system to generate the makefile/script
for the intended target computer. Maybe that might even require adding
a new shell/makefile output to the tool, but it would *not* require
running H.S. Teoh's tool (or anything else) on the actual intended
target platform.

Then, that makefile/script which was generated on...windows or
whatever...is then transferred (email, ftp, floppy, whatever) to the
new system and DONE - a working buildscript, ready to attempt compiling
DMD, without *anything* having been run yet.


> But perhaps that's ok since we're moving DMD to D anyway.
>