Re: Building without posix

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hi!

A bit late, but...

On Fri 15 Apr 2011 00:17, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Dmitry Dzhus <dima@dzhus.org> writes:
>
>> Is POSIX module considered optional?
>
> Not really.
>
>> Configuring guile-2.0 and git trunk with --disable-posix results in the
>> following error on my x86:
>
> I pushed a patch that should allow Guile to be built with
> ‘--disable-posix’.
>
> However, there’s quite a bit of Scheme code that needs access to POSIX
> functions now, notably the compiler.  So a number of file system access
> procedures must be compiled for the compiler to work.
>
> With the patch I pushed, ./check-guile doesn’t even work because
> ‘readdir’ & co. are lacking.  We could change this to compile them even
> with ‘--disable-posix’, but the problem is that there could be even more
> of them, which would defeat the whole point of ‘--disable-posix’, I guess.

I think we should focus on the GNU system, using gnulib to adapt other
systems to look like GNU.  Disabling POSIX bindings helps no one on the
GNU system -- if the question is one of library size, the solution
should be loadable modules, not compile-time options.  We are doing very
well in that way.  A stripped libguile is 1.5MB, like libc.

That said, I don't like a lot of our POSIX bindings.  It's in the
default module, and it's lots of symbols.  But it's probably best to
migrate to some more modularized world using deprecation than to
continue with the --disable-posix fantasy.

Andy
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