ports with bootstrapping dependencies

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:14:33 -0700
   From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh at brierdr.com>

   I realize the pain involved in going this route, but it seems like  
   we're trading mere compilation time for engineering time, and the  
   latter is almost always more expensive.

What engineering time is involved, aside from implementing the small
change I proposed (which I imagine would be very easy), assuming it
doesn't seem a bad idea?

                                            I do understand your desire  
   to not heat up your lap, but speaking from just my personal viewpoint,  
   I'd far rather have a nice, generic port which took an hour to compile  
   than have to figure out which of n ports to use and also deal with the  
   fragility of these ports over what could be multiple OS releases and  
   variable availability of suitable bootstrap compilers for whatever  
   architecture / word size (ppc, ppc64, x86_32, x86_64, and so on) I  
   might be trying to target.

Yes, I'd like to avoid this kind of complexity too -- which is why I
meant exactly what I said in my previous email.  If there is an
existing native build on the system, then I want the native port to
use that; otherwise, everything has to go through the C build.  I'd
like to avoid any cross-compilation complexity, except from C to
native or vice versa, so I have no intention of having separate
`mit-scheme-x86_32', `mit-scheme-x86_64', `mit-scheme-ppc', &c.,
ports.  Just `mit-scheme-c' and `mit-scheme-native'.