Re: [BuildStream] Proposal: Decouple source tracking and building

[Darius Makovsky <darius makovsky codethink co uk>]

On 19/10/2019 03:56, Tristan Van Berkom via buildstream-list wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > On Oct 18, 2019, at 10:56 PM, Chandan Singh <chandan chandansingh net> wrote:
> > [...]
> > In my opinion, these are two different kinds of operations, and don't really
> > need to be part of the same pipeline.
>
> I disagree with this.
>
> The reason why we can track and build in the same session is an optimization, we should not have to wait 
> until all the elements finish tracking before being able to build the first elements which reach a 
> consistent state. I understand the code would be easier to maintain if we didn’t have this feature but I 
> think it really provides good value.

I agree with TVB on this: quality of life improvements to code, while
very important to me, are ultimately secondary to the usefulness of the
product in my opinion. If removing the `--track` options for `build`
will result in a more cumbersome or slower tool then I don't think it;s
the correct approach.

> I do however agree that the UX for this is undesirable and could be improved, one suggestion somebody made 
> on IRC some months ago was to make things a bit scriptable for the more complex invocations, and for 
> running multiple commands in a single session (so we could also have build + checkout for instance, which 
> has been requested as a convenience by some users).

That would actually make sense and I think make bst more versatile. I
don't anticipate it would be difficult to support reading commands from
a user configuration file.

best regards,
Darius

-- 
For privacy-policy please see https://www.codethink.co.uk/privacy.html