Re: Build system (was: SVG format in ...)

[Marcin Antczak <marcin antczak e-dev pl>]

W liÅ?cie z czw, 04-09-2003, godz. 18:35, Ronald Bultje pisze: 
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 16:57, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> > The GNU autotools could definitely use a replacement, but it would be
> > wrong to make it gnome specific, because that would just make it more
> > difficult to build gnome for people who has learned he autotools way
> > of doing it.
> 
> I don't understand that every single second, new people pop up that have
> the greatest idea of replacing everything that has been established so
> far with their own oh-so-wonderful idea. "Oh yes, we'll just have to
> rewrite everything and the world will be good." You know what makes GNU
> autotools so wonderful? The fact that nearly everyone uses it. It's a
> standard already.
> 
> Think about that for a second. There's not a lot of projects that can
> say that.
> 
> And you want to throw that all away? Of course you don't! But yes, you
> could wrap them inside a nice GUI layer like Visual Studio does (in
> essence, it looks quite a lot like the GNU autotools build system). That
> shouldn't be too hard. I suppose Anjuta & co already do this, actually.

Exactly - I didn't said that I want to throw away GNU autotools build
system but I was saying that they doesn't suite to Desktop Environment
with their "look and feel".

Gnu autotools are great and powefull but when you have single
application to build.

When you have complex environment with complex dependencies between
modules GNU autotools shows all their drawbacks.

And the problem in my opinion is that when you want to build Gnome then
you almost always have to build 5 or more applications or libraries.

I was sick looking on my monitor when running Garnome which performed
almost the same tests with ./configure for each application... 

So, I would like to see some kind of application which allow me to
configure building procedure in visual way and also will optimize this
procedure - reducing duplicated procedures.

I don't know why when you see proposal like I did you think that: "Oooo
we have heretic who want's to throw away all our precious tools".

I just want to see a modern way to maintain modern environment.
And I don't want to use "external" tools for this.

In fact the situation here is classic:

We have developers which develop applications and publishes sources.
And we have distributors (RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ximian) which
takes source and make packages...

I just wonder why if we have Gnome community which provides entire
Desktop Environment there is no something like "Gnome distribution" with
it's own installer, own tools for maintaining...

It could be based on GNU autotools - in fact this could take a huge
amount of time to create a new build system from scratch and it would be
very hard to maintain.

But maybe there is a way to use current tools in more efficent way.


-- 
Marcin Antczak <marcin antczak e-dev pl>