[TRE-general] tre

[skaller]

On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 22:52 +0300, Ville Laurikari wrote:

[excuse multiple postings, moving to felix and tre mailing
lists]

> On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 04:43:56AM +1000, skaller wrote:
> > > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libtre4
> > No use to me .. i'm running Ubuntu. But glad to see someone
> > wrapped it! 
> 
> Oh, I thought you were specifically asking for a Debian package.

My basic problem here is the same for all third party packages.

Felix currently requires

(a) Ocaml
(b) Python
(c) A C++ compiler (at least VS2003 or gcc supported)

and nothing else. Some optional components such as
gmp, SDL, GSL, can also be installed (painfully at the moment).

When you download and install Ocaml or Python, you get
the kitchen sink built for you, Felix needs to be the
same. Any requirement to install extra third party
components is a significant negative.

The 'built' system requires only the C++ compiler,
neither Python nor Ocaml is required on the target.

At present Felix also supports a GLR parser, Scott
McPeak's Elkhound, which is built directly by Felix.

This is why in the first instance I tried to build TRE
from source *inside* Felix, in particular since it
alone has proper control over the target environment.

The build currently works 'out of the box' from
CMD.EXE command line in windows for win32. No need
for Cygwin or Mingw -- many Windows programmers have
only Microsoft tools available.

I personally build on 

(a) Linux
(b) cygwin
(c) cygwin/nocygwin (mingw)
(d) win32
(e) win64 (trying anyhow ..)

so as you can see 4 of the 5 platforms I have access to
are not 'unix like' platforms.

Also we have a DD on the team, so the system has to build
and test on all Debian architectures. Other developers
are using OSX (various versions) and Solaris/x86.

The problem here is that I don't want to view 'regular
expressions' as an 'optional extra'. Felix is a scripting
language, regexps should be 'built in' and 'standard'.
[I really DISLIKE string regexps intensely .. but that's
a different issue :]

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net