From: Jay Levitt <lists-ruby@...>
Date: 2007-11-14T23:32:47+09:00
Subject: Re: mingw rename

On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:08:38 +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> Does Ruby need the architecture triple as a single string? I think the
> problem is that we're trying to use a single string to represent the
> target combination. 

Well, I agree that even what autoconf calls the "canonical system type"
(cpu-vendor-system or cpu-vendor-kernel-system) can suffer from the
counting problem.  Ruby in its current state makes it even harder by
removing some of that info to create RUBY_PLATFORM.

But yeah, you can't represent the individualities of each system in a
standardized 3-to-4-part string. In fact, after staring at it for half an
hour, I'm not sure if there's even a proper (e.g. non-"win"-substring) way
in the canonical system type to represent Windows.

> The other problem is that the architecture triple
> doesn't necessarily help with Microsoft compiler variants (my
> Google-fu is failing me to be certain).
> 
> Why should we be using a single Regex for this when we could be doing
> other, smarter things with multiple objects or strings?

A simple start might be just exposing the whole autoconf cache from build
time as an OStruct, or something like that?  We probably don't need a whole
MakeMaker world.

-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer