[rfc] accumulating ifdef def else def endif in usage.h [was: Re: crond usage documentation oddity (busybox v1.1.0-pre1)]

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 15 October 2005 16:41, Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> >much prefer that to a dependency on an external tool like perl. :)
>
> awk, perl. It's all the same ;)

No, it isn't.

Awk is built into busybox, and busybox containing just awk is <27k.

Miniperl is a megabyte, and that's the one built from a five year old version 
of perl (which is in general much smaller than the current version).  Its 
configuration stage is a nightmare that changes with each version, and 
getting it to build against uClibc was a real pain last time I tried it.

As for the language itself, you can learn awk from the (single) man page.  The 
perl man page, meanwhile, is a list of dozens of other man pages.  The perl 
overview alone is 3 man pages, the FAQ is 9 man pages, the perl reference is 
40 man pages, and other groups of man pages include the internals group, 
miscelaneous, language-specific, platform-specific...

And then it talks about additional documention you probably don't have 
installed, and which it doesn't even tell you how to get:

       Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is available, both
       those distributed with Perl and third-party modules which are packaged
       or locally installed.

And then a few lines down:

       But wait, there’s more...

At which point I go away and do something else.

Trust me, it's NOT the same.

> >Query about the name though: if you're going to tag generated files with a
>
> I don't care how it is named, that was a name that came quickly to my
> mind "Private helper for usage".
>
> >beginning underscore, shouldn't all of our generated files have such a
> > tag, including things like bb_config.h?
>
> We could then add _*.h to .svnignore, or however it's called, instead of
> enumerating them individually. I don't have an opinion on that naming
> convention. Hm, otoh bb_config.h is the header for the applet bb_config,
> iirc, so we may want to keep the name bb_config.h. Dunno.

And "make clean".

No, you're thinking bbconfig.h.  "bb_config.h" is the one I added (before 
bbconfig.h went in) to contain the ENABLE_* macros.

Rob