[MLton] Re: Bug#220046: mlton: Build-Depends on itself

[Roland Stigge]

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On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 00:58, Stephen Weeks wrote:
> The situation is not unlike that of gcc, which requires another
> (possibly older) binary version of gcc to build.

Right. But unlike the situation of gcc, we have a solution to the
problem.

> > In the docs there is mentioned that one could build MLton with SML/NJ,
> > but the Debian package smlnj seems to have the same problem. Maybe the
> > solution of the similar problem with SML/NJ can solve this bug too.
>=20
> It would be nice if other SML compilers could be used to bootstrap
> MLton.  But, unfortunately it's not feasible.  Building MLton with
> SML/NJ isn't too bad.  But using that version to bootstrap a
> self-compiled version of MLton is not practical because the version of
> MLton compiled by SML/NJ runs *much* more slowly than the version
> compiled by MLton.

Fortunately, no autobuilders would be stressed for that because mlton is
just "Architecture: i386" and you can do it on your development machine
(and uploads don't seem to be too often).

I think it's worth it. Remember that ideally, we can build _most_ of
Debian from source (by bootstrapping just from a small build environment
that would need mlton otherwise).

> > This is possibly a serious bug, but I'm aware that Policy doesn't
> > explicitly forbid Build-Depending on itself.
>=20
> In my opinion, this is not a bug.  It is a (possible) consequence of
> building a self-hosting compiler.  So, would you rather I close the
> bug or change its severity to wishlist?  Or do you have other ideas?

smlnj seems to be in a good shape soon, so please consider my
suggestions. If you don't see it important enough, feel free to lower
the severity yourself (to wait for others to rise it again ;).

bye,
  Roland

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