Re: [squid-users] squid Make; bug in Makefile?

tor 2006-03-09 klockan 11:10 -0800 skrev Linda Walsh:

> Now I find it's just the opposite and go through the opposite rationalization
> -- that moving to awk creates a smaller software requirement for someone wanting
> to build squid (presuming they don't need to modify it).

Exacly.

awk is part of standard UNIX, and found in everything wanting to call
itself UNIX or UNIX-like.. at least in some form (not many complies with
the standard however)

perl is not, even if it is quite well spread today.

> I don't know that I can do as good a job rationalizing the choice for a switch to
> awk though. Even though awk may be a smaller footprint for generation (build),
> I not sure that benefit would outweigh the decrease in # of people who would
> know how to modify it. ??

The scrips is as arcane no matter the language. Actually the awk
versions is probably easier to maintain for dummies as they are in fact
simpler than the perl versions, but it's also the case that these are
just build support scripts translating certain source files during the
build process and not something you normally look at. During the history
of Squid there has been a total of 4 revisions of mk-string-arrays

  1997-11-20 Initial
  1997-11-20 Syntax error bugfix
  1998-02-12 Added one additional keyword the script should look for
  1998-04-07 Added yet another keyword the script should look for
  2006-02-22 Switched to AWK

similar situation for mk-globals-c

The switch from perl to awk was contributed by a user wanting to build
Squid at a location where installing perl was not feasible. As it
reduces the build time dependencies there was really no reason to not
accept the contribution.

> One "could" make a similar argument for using "C" vs. "C++", as "C" is
> a 'lower common denominator" in terms of software tools and developer knowledge,
> though such a change would affect alot more than "2" scripts. :-)

We had a quite lengthy debate before switching from C to C++. It is
actually the switch from C to C++ which made Squid-3 Squid-3 (if we had
stayed with C it would have been Squid-2.6), and also a major
contributing factor to why the release is not quite ready yet after too
many years.. but it will probably turn out well in the end.

> I tried looking, BTW, for a pointer to the CVS sources, but wasn't able to
> readily find a pointer to the CVS sources from the main site (and didn't know
> about the "devel" site until after I'd started looking through the sources from
> the tarball)...

It is there in the developers section. squid-cache.org -> Misc /
Developers. Both how you access the CVS repository and how to browse it
online.

The devel site is different even if you also can find a CVS repository
there.. The devel site is targeting developers, not users. The contents
of the two CVS repositories is also slightly different as some
autogenerated "junk" not needed by developers but quite needed by
end-users is only found in the main CVS, and history is only available
in the main CVS.

It also happens that the devel site is linked from that same page
above..

Regards
Henrik