Re: build systems

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 00:37 +0200, Lucas Rocha wrote:
>  - What's the *problem* that needs to be solved that really demands us
> to choose another build system?

The problem is the initial step; I only started coding open source stuff
a few years ago, and the biggest hurdle was just making stuff build with
autotools. The C and C++ was the easy bit, the autotools mess just got
in the way.

> - Are the current drawbacks of using autotools in GNOME so so so
> annoying that it would be really worth the effort of migrating to
> something else?

Well, I just copy and paste chunks of code in configure.ac from other
projects, changing the names of constants where required. I really don't
understand how this stuff all works. It's so compicated and legacy bodge
over lagacy bodge. It's slow to build and smatters small script files
all over my source tree - and when it blows up i've not got any idea how
to debug it or fix things.

> Honestly, I think there are much more important things to care about
> than build systems at this moment. Changing the build system in GNOME
> would involve a relatively large amount of (boring) (re-)work just to
> reach the same old thing that we have now: "./configure && make &&
> make install" (with some improvements of course but with some new
> drawbacks also).

Not changing... changing like kde did would be a disaster in my opinion.
But giving people a choice would be a great thing. Use autotools if you
want, but also _support_ waf if you like less crufty stuff going on.

Richard.