[m-dev.] Version of Mercury to Compile Mercury

[Mark Brown]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Paul Bone <paul at bone.id.au> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 01:07:38AM +1000, Mark Brown wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 4:50 AM, Zoltan Somogyi
>> >
>> > I have been thinking of a way to set things up that would make this simpler.
>> > We could put a zero-size file into the source distribution (named something
>> > like ".this_is_a_src_dist" or similar) to act as a flag. The configure script would
>> > detect this, and ignore any installed mmc, out-of-date or not, to make sure
>> > that the .c files supplied by the source distribution are not accidentally overwritten.
>> > The last action of "make install" could be then to delete this file, if it exists.
>> >
>> > What do people think?
>>
>> I agree. Few users would actually benefit from bootstrapping source
>> distributions from existing installs, and even then they would need to
>> override that behaviour from time to time.
>
> I also agree, however sometimes I do want to do this.  On a 64bit machine,
> which is all of them, I will install Mercury once, then bootstrap the same
> version using the installed version.

That will occur after "make install", so this will work as intended.

The users who would lose out are those who are regularly installing a
new compiler by downloading lots of RsOTD, rather than using git. You
probably don't want to encourage those users anyway.

> Whichever "make clean" removes the .c files should also remove this file.

That would also get people who are merely cleaning up after an
interrupted install.

Cheers,
Mark.