On 10/08/2012 19:29, Bruno Le Floch wrote:
> One of my main concerns, after looking at the plethora of Makefiles
> and make.bat is that there is a lot of redundancy there, which means
> that (1) changes don't propagate well (2) we occasionally forget to
> add a module to the Makefile of the parent directory, and it never
> gets tested, installed, unless someone is working on that module.
>
> So I guess that in the LaTeX3 case the discussion should be extended
> to the build system as a whole: the test system works well, as Frank
> says.  It would be nice if we could get rid of Makefiles and make.bat,
> and replace them by light-weight configuration files.  After all, the
> Makefiles are all very similar, so a top-level Lua script (or other)
> should be able to do most of the work.

I did consider working to have fewer files, but the problem seemed to be
that each module should be usable independently (install/test/document),
so you need some form of stub in each directory. Once you do that, it
seems somewhat pointless to go to the effort of passing all the
requirements as arguments or similar. It's also the case that l3kernel
has different requirements from everything else.

Over all, there is a question of time balance. We have a lot to do on
the TeX side, and also should be aiming to move 'experimental' material
to a more 'usable' state. Thus the long-term target is for
l3kernel/l3packages to contain most (all?) of the code, which means
fewer build scripts for the most important material. So when I last
looked at the build system it did not seem like a good use of my time to
spend it rejigging a system which already works and which does not
itself add code to LaTeX3.

> The guy might have an old TeX distro :).  Probably you're right that
> all potential LaTeX3 testers probably have a reasonably up-to-date
> distro.  However, how "up-to-date" does it have to be?  Anyone knows
> when texlua was introduced?

Certainly after pdfTeX 1.30.0, which is the base requirement to run
LaTeX3 code ;-)
-- 
Joseph Wright