Re: build system alternatives (Was: Using vala in GNOME)

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 12:01 -0300, Johan Dahlin wrote:
> Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 15:07 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> [..]
> 
> >> Plus, CMake is getting more mature and stable and it already supports
> >> VisualStudio and XCode project files conversion, lack of proper
> >> extensibility being its only downside at the moment.
> > 
> > Lack of extensibility, and use of another arcane custom made programming
> > language (if we can call it that) for everything.
> > 
> > No, CMake is not an answer.  It is not significantly better than
> > autotools to justify a switch to it IMHO.
> 
> CMake *is* considerably better. Xcode/VisualStudio are killer features which 
> alone would make a switch worth it.

I disagree that Xcode/VisualStudio are killer features.  A powerful
programming language and extensibility are way better features IMHO.
Does a significant percentage of GNOME developers use any of these IDEs?
Without such data you can't assert that those are killer features. 

For the case of Vala, I don't see how CMake handles it any better than
autotools.

> 
> Can we please start to organize ourselves and try to move forward with 
> switching to another build system?

We can't switch to any single build system any more than we can switch
to a single DVCS.  Or to a single programming language, for that matter!
Different developers value different features.  Modern developers have
to adapt to different environments.  I, for example, regularly program
in C, C++, and Python.  I know how to use cvs, subversion, bazaar, git
(poorly), and mercurial.  In particular I use subversion, bazaar, and
mercurial very regularly, all at the same time, git not so much only
because I didn't need to.  I can hack plain makefiles,
autoconf/automake, waf, and scons.

> 
> Proposal:
> - Decide features we need to do a migrate
> - Create a table of proposed build systems x features
> - Check the KDE build system migration and see what we can learn[1]
> - An obvious option will eventually appear
> - Start migrate some modules
> 
> [1]: Tim has some notes on this: 
> http://blogs.gnome.org/timj/2008/06/02/02062008-linuxtag-2008/
> 
> Johan
-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
"The universe is always one step beyond logic" -- Frank Herbert