Re: patch/proposal: obsolete configurations in 3.1

[Paul Koning <pkoning@equallogic.com>]

Excerpt of message (sent 15 April 2002) by Phil Edwards:
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 10:42:59PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> > 
> > > Maybe have something like "if you're just going to be building a native
> > > compiler for our 3 most popular platforms, grab these tiny tarballs,
> > > else grab the whole thing."
> > 
> > Old news for DJGPP.  Our source distributions are stripped of most of
> > the files that aren't used for a DJGPP native build.  The files are
> > about 60% of their original size that way.
> 
> I thought about this some more while in the shower.  Maybe downloading a
> release should involve:
> 
> 1.  "Download this tar.bz2 file.  It is the core C compiler and middle-end
> pieces, with no other language support, and no back-end support."
> 
> 2.  "Optionally, download these tarballs to support additional languages,
> such as C++, FORTRAN, Java, treelang, and Brainfunct."
> 
> 3.  "Download the config-*.tar.bz2 file(s) for the platform(s) you wish
> to support.  At least one platform backend file must be downloaded."

I'm not convinced the config/* subtree is big enough to make that much
extra complexity worth dealing with.

If you really want to have a "trimmed config" tarball, I'd suggest
splitting it just two ways: the "most popular targets" (which are in
the core C tarball) and the "all targets" supplemental tarball.

Then all that's left is to live through the debate about what's "most
popular". :-)

	  paul