Re: build systems

["Daniel Svensson" <dsvensson gmail com>]

On Nov 9, 2007 12:27 PM, daniel g. siegel <dgsiegel gmail com> wrote:
> so richard hughes and ali sabil told me about waf
> (http://code.google.com/p/waf/) as a build system replace for toc2,
> which would support translations nicely. has anyone used this tool?

The XMMS2 project uses Waf and we are very happy with it. It's fast
and extensible, with a small, but friendly and helpful developer crowd
around it. In the early days we used autohell, that got replaced with
SCons which we used for a long time, but about a year ago our setup
had degraded to something not so maintainable. We had started using
SCons pretty early and lots of features we solved in our custom
Environment were added to SCons, so we had to either rewrite our
current SCons setup, or look elsewhere. A user contributed a complete
conversion to waf (which started off as a fork of SCons) and after
trying it out we were hooked. waf runs in two steps, first configure,
then build. And I cannot stress enough how fast it is. Zooom! Also it
has a very nice looks ;)

For some examples you could have a look at:
http://git.xmms.se/?p=xmms2-devel.git;a=tree

The top wscript is pretty big in our case, but that all depends on how
configurable your project is. If you browse wscripts down in the scr
directory you see that they are pretty slim.

There are also a lot of examples in the waf svn repository over at:
http://waf.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/

And the irc channel can be found on freenode, #waf.

And I guess you've seen Richards blog about waf and gnome?
http://hughsient.livejournal.com/11016.html

Worth noting is that SCons had a GSoC project to implement
distributing support that most open source project needs (the largest
missing feature of SCons), and SCons has a MUCH bigger community
surrounding it, both open source projects, and commercial actors, and
a very active mailinglist for support. But that GSoC hasn't been
merged yet, and I don't know the timeframe, so starting to use SCons
this day requires some hacking to make people who package the software
for the distributions happy.

More info on the GSoC project here:
http://www.scons.org/wiki/GSoC2007/MaciejPasternacki

When that has been merged, the choice between waf and SCons gets more delicate.

-- 
Daniel Svensson, <dsvensson gmail com>