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Build System

============

This document is intended to provide an overview of what the build

system intends to achieve, and how it intends to achieve it.

Makefiles

---------

The Makefile dialect of choice is bmake: a portable version of NetBSD's

make(1) program. This is chosen primarily for its expressiveness, and,

therefore, convenience.

bmake provides its own rules and macros - these are not used:

everything required is present in the local ./mk directory.

Portability

-----------

With the proposed restructuring, the source is split into roughly two

portions:

 1. Support tools and utilities (sid, lexi, etc)

 2. The TenDRA compiler itself.

Both these are portable, though the latter also undergoes bootstrapping.

So, our build system needs to provide for compiling the above with

whichever compiler happens to be present on the operating system. For

the support programs, this is the most common case, as they are

expected to be used separately from TenDRA.

Bootstrapping

-------------

Bootstrapping is the process of producing a "quick and dirty"

compilation of the TenDRA compiler, such that it can be then used

itself to compile the final version.

This is required for building TenDRA if TenDRA is not present on the

system to begin with - the bootstrapping process is to avoid a Catch-22

situation of not having the compiler present to compile the compiler.

Bootstrapping is considered good form for a compiler: it is expected

that the compiler be used to compile itself, if for no other reason

than as a sign of faith. Additionally, rather than working around the

idiosyncrancies of each available compiler, we can focus our efforts on

supporting only our own implementation.

Also of interest may be the cases where only a partial implementation

of a compiler is available: we can possibly use these to compile just

enough of our own code in order to completely build our own system.

Other reasons include TenDRA's emphasis on code correctness: we simply

trust our output more than we trust other compilers. This is viewed as

important for producing the compiler, which is relied upon for

producing correct output from a wide variety of inputs.

Tools and Utilities

-------------------

Viewing these programs as entirely separate entities from the TenDRA

compiler itself, we see no reason why they should have an affinity to a

particular compiler any more than any other program would.

From another perspective, the idea behind bootstrapping is to end with

the installed binaries of the TenDRA suite to have been built by TenDRA

itself. However, these programs are no longer to be part of the TenDRA

suite; they are to become separate entities.

From the point of view of a system administrator installing TenDRA for

the first time, it is likely that the other binaries in the operating

system would not have been built by TenDRA: these auxiliary tools fall

into the same category as the other unrelated programs already present.