Re: strawman (Was Re: build systems)

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

On 12/11/2007, Nicolas Trangez <eikke eikke com> wrote:

On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 22:41 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> However, the most important point for this discussion is that this
> approach makes it hard to provide a high-level UI a'la Eclipse or Visual
> Studio which is what many many people are used to. One way to do this is
> to use a declarative programming language (e.g. XML) to express the
> build process.
I'm somewhat afraid when using XML to express a build process you'll end
up with a pretty complex schema (I know Ant and similar, don't forget
building a Java or .Net project is much simpeler than
$RANDOM_C_LIBRARY), so complex the only way to edit your build file
*will* be to use some IDE.
>
> Of course, being a realist, it's naive to believe that such a
> declarative language would be able to cover all of free software and
> replace autotools in general. However, if you consider just GNOME,
> perhaps it's possible to come up with a short and sweet declarative
> language. If we had that we could use it in at least three ways
>
>  - We could have a dedicated GNOME program that interpreted these build
>    recipes and built binaries for you.
>
>  - It would be straightforward (I didn't say easy) to write Eclipse,
>    Visual Studio, Xcode etc. With this developers would never need
>    to touch a shell. Certainly this is a big selling point.
>
>  - Another program could generate configure.in, Makefile.am etc. for
>    rolling distribution tarballs. This would satisfy the requirements
>    for e.g. being able to build only if you have make(1), gcc(1) and
>    core UNIX utilities around.
>
> So the proposal here would be to roll our own build system that is
> highly optimized only for GNOME/GTK+ applications. Thoughts?
While I do agree using some declarative language to describe a build
process is useful for IDE integration, I think this wouldn't be a gain
for maintainers not using any IDE, as maintaining the build files would
be rather hard (does anyone who doesn't use some IDE with integrated
build-system support use Ant and writes his ant files in $EDITOR?).

Yes I do. A lot. While Ant (and just about any XML representation of build instructions) will be quite verbose compared to a Makefile.am, they are quite a lot easier to debug, both because XML errors and schema compliance errors can be described quite precisely by the build system.

If
we'd want to have build support in IDE's I guess we can easily stick to
ant (which is a de-facto "standard" afaik, next to MS vcproj and alike)
and provide GTK+/GNOME-specific Ant tasks.

Ant contains some Java'isms which I don't like. As stated in another thread on d-d-l; in my perfect build system the syntax of the build recipes will be completely decoupled from the implementation of the build system. That way we also use auto*, waf or ant or <xyz> to implement the actual build system, and change that at any point in the future if we see the need.

Cheers,
Mikkel