> On 7 Sep 2022, at 13:33, Martin Liška <mli...@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> On 9/7/22 12:56, Richard Sandiford via Gcc wrote:
>> Ulrich Drepper via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> writes:
>>> I talked to Jonathan the other day about adding all the C++ library APIs to
>>> the name hint file now that the size of the table is not really a concern
>>> anymore.
>>>
>>> Jonathan mentioned that he has to create and maintain a similar file for
>>> the module support. It needs to list all the exported interfaces and this
>>> is mostly a superset of the entries in the hint table.
>>>
>>> Instead of duplicating the information it should be kept in one place.
>>> Neither file itself is a natural fit because the additional information
>>> needed (e.g., the standard version information for the name hint table) is
>>> not needed in the other location.
>>>
>>> Hence, let's use a simple database, a CSV file for simplicity, and generate
>>> both files from this. Easily done, I have an appropriate script and a CSV
>>> file with the information of both Jonathan's current export file and the
>>> current state of the name hint table.
>>>
>>> The only detail that keeps me from submitting this right now is the way the
>>> script is implemented. This is just a natural fit for a Python script.
>>> The default installation comes with a csv module and there are nice ways to
>>> adjust and output boilerplate headers like those needed in those files.
>>>
>>> It would be possible to create separate awk scripts (there is only one
>>> Python script) but it'll be rather ugly and harder to maintain than the
>>> Python version.
>>>
>>> Of course the problem is: I don't think that there is yet any maintainer
>>> tool written in Python (except some release engineering tools). The
>>> question is therefore: is it time to lift this restriction? I cannot today
>>> imagine any machine capable of serving a gcc developer which doesn't also
>>> have a Python implementation. As long as there is no dependency on exotic
>>> modules I doubt that anything will break.
>>
>> FWIW, I agree it's past time to lift the no-Python restriction,
>> and that Python is a natural fit for stuff like this.
( no objection to using Python here )
One small request, I realise that Python 2 is dead, but I regularly bootstrap
GCC
on older machines that only have Python 2 installations. If possible (and it
sounds
plausible if the job is really quite simple) - it would be good to support
those older
machines without having to take a detour to find a way to build Python 3 on
them first.
Iain
