Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Basically because "everybody" does it, i.e. each frontent has its own such driver AFAIK. But that's not a coercing point, of course. And, as I said, we could still offer the (current) gpc driver (without automake) under another (and even longer, AFAIC ;-) name.
You many times mentioned removing automake. I think you are too fast here. As I understand main problems with automake are: 1) bugs 2) maintenance
IMHO the main remaining bug is that gpc writes to GPI files after compiling interface. That bug affects `gp' too. Both automake and `gp' try to workaround that, but the real fix is to write implementation info in another place (for example a new GPI file).
Concerning maintenance I do not think the cost is so big, and one part (updating `gpc' driver) ATM is "paid" for next few months.
I am somwhat affraid of effort to maintain `gp'. I gave only short look over the sources and I did not give it real trial. However, from your comments I understand that ATM `gp' misses some automake features. Also, I am somewhat concerned by the `gp' parser (you use flex to implement it, but conceptually it is a parser). In fact, it is not clear that in GNU Pascal one can find names of imported interfaces/units without looking at all of imported interfaces. The problem is that parsing requires to know what a keyword is and many keywords are "weak" -- they may be redefined (also in imported interfaces!). Frank, you probably analysed that, but assumptions needed for `gp' to work should be written up. And some time is needed to asess if changes to GNU Pascal language will not invalidate those assumptions.
So IMHO we need few months (or a year) for `gp' to stablise _before_ we can depreciate automake. And I think that we should have a year of depreciation before removal.