[Ecls-list] Help needed, really

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis
> <gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
>> <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis
>> > <gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > Extracting the information from there might be easier and more
>> >> > portable.
>> >>
>> >> Yes, that is what I suggested in private conversion.  In fact, all it
>> >> takes is
>> >> just link a dummy C file against the GMP library and look at the binary
>> >> flavour of the program as indicated above.  I suspect that the `file'
>> >> utility will handle most cases.
>> >
>> > The hardest point of the conversation, and one that people do not seem
>> > to
>> > get, is that I have no idea how to do this which is written in the
>> > paragraph
>> > and in the discussion before. Really, it makes the discussion very hard
>> > that
>> > people do not realize that I have no idea how to get binary information
>> > from
>> > an executable, or gather the binary mode from GMP just by linking a
>> > custom
>> > program -- to begin with, it would be utterly impossible to link against
>> > this library before having guessed the appropriate linker/compiler
>> > flags!
>>
>> I have no idea what you mean by "linking against this library before
>> having guessed the appropriate linker/compiler flags!".  I don't recall
>> I ever suggest that, and I really don't understand what you mean by that.
>>
>> -- Gaby
>
> The sentence "In fact, all it takes is just link a dummy C file against the
> GMP library and look at the binary flavour of the program as indicated
> above" implies that the dummy file has to be linked against GMP. That in
> turn requires knowing what type of library it is, whether it was built with
> long integers, small pointers, whatever.

No, that was not the suggestion.

Let me explain one more time.

You link this dummy C file against the GMP library just the same way you
currently build and link ECL against the GMP.  The configuration/build
requirements remains exactly the same.  If GMP is system-wide
installed, you just proceed to link the dummy file against the library, using
exactly the same flags as you currently do.  If you have to build GMP, you
build that library first (as you currently do),
 then you link the dummy C file against that with exactly
the same flags as you do today.  Nothing changes there.  You do
not need to infer the binary personality before you link against GMP.
The purpose of that dummy program is solely to give the same binary
personality that the ECL program and library would have.  The only reason
you would do that before proceeding with the remaining ECL build is so
that you can cache that information in the ECL image (e.g. *FEATURES*)
if you so chose to.  You can very well just build the usual ecl program, then
determine the binary personally, and put that in some file that gets installed
with the the ECL system and make it available to users later.

The possibilities are numerous, but we do not need to pick the worse
possible realization or non-realization of the idea and shut the whole
thing down on that basis.

-- Gaby