ICU for Rakudo on Debian
Allison Randal
requirement for the Debian Parrot packages. They're trying to build nqp
from source and it fails tests without ICU. I have a couple of questions
around this:
- I hate adding extra dependencies, but I also tend to lean toward
supporting whatever languages need from the Parrot packages. Anyone see
any problem with requiring ICU for Parrot on Debian?
- We're currently shipping a version of NQP pre-built in Parrot. If
people are building nqp from source separately (or just installing it
from packages), can we drop that pre-built version from the Parrot repo?
Allison
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Andrew Whitworth
Parrot, not an optional add-on. Eventually when we realize that
seamless built-in unicode support is a core selling point for Parrot,
I think we will want to make that change. I'm perfectly happy with
making it a dependency for Parrot's package on Debian and anywhere
else.
The version of NQP we're shipping with Parrot now is the older NQP-rx.
I think we're building it as the "parrot-nqp" binary. This version is
used for some things in the core repo and for some older HLLs. The new
6model-powered version is called simply "NQP" and is not shipped with
the Parrot repo. Eventually our plan is to eliminate NQP-rx and
replace it with the new NQP (maybe even snapshotting it into the
Parrot repo), but we aren't there yet.
--Andrew Whitworth
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Allison Randal
> For the record, I'm in favor of making ICU a requirement for building
> Parrot, not an optional add-on. Eventually when we realize that
> seamless built-in unicode support is a core selling point for Parrot,
> I think we will want to make that change. I'm perfectly happy with
> making it a dependency for Parrot's package on Debian and anywhere
> else.
Okay, sounds fine. ICU is 33 MB installed, compared to Parrot's < 2MB
install size. Not a big deal for the average Debian install, but
definitely something to keep in mind for making it a universal requirement.
> The version of NQP we're shipping with Parrot now is the older NQP-rx.
> I think we're building it as the "parrot-nqp" binary. This version is
> used for some things in the core repo and for some older HLLs. The new
> 6model-powered version is called simply "NQP" and is not shipped with
> the Parrot repo. Eventually our plan is to eliminate NQP-rx and
> replace it with the new NQP (maybe even snapshotting it into the
> Parrot repo), but we aren't there yet.
So nqp-rx is an old, unmaintained library? I'll probably just drop it
from the Debian packages. And, didn't NQP replace some combination of
PCT/PGE? Can any of that be dropped?
In the age of packaging, there's not much point in bundling a bunch of
stuff in the base tarball, it's just so easy to pull in external
dependencies.
Allison
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Brian Gernhardt
On Mar 22, 2012, at 1:04 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
> So nqp-rx is an old, unmaintained library? I'll probably just drop it
> from the Debian packages. And, didn't NQP replace some combination of
> PCT/PGE? Can any of that be dropped?
nqp-rx is still the primary way to create grammars and languages. Too much of our documentation uses it for us to drop it, I think. NQP uses PCT, but it may very well have replaced PGE.
~~benabik
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Jonathan "Duke" Leto
> Okay, sounds fine. ICU is 33 MB installed, compared to Parrot's < 2MB
> install size. Not a big deal for the average Debian install, but
> definitely something to keep in mind for making it a universal requirement.
I am hesitant to make ICU a hard dependency, because it may not be available on
mobile/embedded systems and/or people may not want to use it because it adds
too much to the memory footprint. Anybody have data on the memory footprint
of a Parrot interp with and without ICU?
On the other hand, this may be what we need to justify having "flavors" of
Parrot. At the least, we need a "desktop" flavor and an "embedded" flavor.
The "desktop" flavor could basically be the "embedded" flavor with
more libraries/etc thrown in.
I envision that we will then show people how we built each flavor and give them
the tools to build their own Parrot flavors. I see this as a key differentiator
and killer feature.
Duke
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Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jona...@leto.net>
Leto Labs LLC
209.691.DUKE // http://labs.leto.net
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