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On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 6:02 PM, Robert Raschke <rtrlists@googlemail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Mikhail Gusarov <dottedmag@dottedmag.net> wrote:

Twas brillig at 08:56:07 21.03.2010 UTC-03 when lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br
did gyre and gimble:

 >> Also, I have searched in the whole tarball and i didn't see any .pc
 >> file. Is it normal ?

 LHdF> Yes. We're reducing the number of files in the tar.

Why not drop all the *.c then? :) Insane.


In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

BTW, this is not to be taken literally to mean that nothingness is perfection. But it is to be interpreted in context. Your solution to something in particular is perfect when you cannot remove anything without compromising the integrity of your solution. Thus, just putting all the C code into one file is not changing anything at all, only making everyones life a little bit harder.

it was a joke... (and you're answering to the wrong guy, btw). Of course a big project with only one file is almost impossible to maintain.  I wanted to say that i found the answer stupid : don't add a single, useful, and *very small* file because the lua dev want to reduce the number of files is crazy.
 
Instead, should the main Lua distribution include pkg-config, rpm, deb, etc.? ... Why not have a setup.exe builder while we're at it? That way lies madness and is best left to mad people.

Having a small tarbal is good, but you are currently removing files and this does *not* help coders at all. rpm, deb etc.. are done by the maintainers of the distro. You should not write them. The .pc file, on the other hand, will be used by coders, and by distro maintainers. By removing it, you are shooting in your foot.

That's like the horrible Makefile's. I would prefer having 4 or 5 files that configure/build lua easily, in a portable way, rather than just 2 files that are difficult to modify. FFmpeg or geexbox are using one configure script + 2 Makefile, it's fast, portable, no modification is done if you want to compile on linux, opensolaris, BSD, windows etc... That's just one file more than your 2 Makefile.  And  I find their way to build a *lot* better.

You're saying "Why not have a setup.exe builder while we're at it?" It's extreme and I answer this: If I follow your logic of reducing the number of files, why 2 Makefile ? One would be sufficient. Better : you remove it and put the instructions to build lua in the (existing) README. It's extreme too, of course and i would not like to have such build procedure. I want to show you that the argument of "reducing the number of file" is not good at all and can just make lua users/coders' life harder. And of course adding useless file is also not good (rpm, deb, etc.. should not be in lua tarball, for example, but a Visua Studio solution/vcproj should be, because most Windows coders use this IDE, and certainly most of them do not use MinGW (with or without MSYS)).

Vincent Torri