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

[Paul Bone]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:12:14AM +1000, Mark Brown wrote:
> 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 detect this, and ignore any installed mmc, out-of-date or not, to make sure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.

As would removing the C files at that point.

At the risk of overcomplicating this, which bad also because it can make
things difficult to understand.  One option is that "make clean" shouldn't
remove the C files if this special file is present, but make distclean
should remove the special file and the C files in all cases.


-- 
Paul Bone
http://www.bone.id.au