Re: AC_MSG_RESULT(patching libtool to fix HIDEOUS BREAKAGE) [was Re:dconf 0.5]

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On Wed, 04 Aug 2010 at 22:54:59 +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
> Meanwhile Waf is
> architecturally quite simple and allows you to write concise scripts
> in Python.

... but it appears to be distribution-hostile, at least in its current state:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-devel lists debian org/msg281373.html

Yes, autofoo also results in embedding a copy of itself in tarballs, but
distributions who have a newer/more-bugfixed version of autofoo than the
upstream can generally autoreconf it. Waf doesn't seem to be upgradable in a
similar way.

(For instance, Debian policy requires updating libraries' config.guess,
config.sub at build time, since the versions in older upstream tarballs often
don't know about all the supported architectures in Debian. Some Debian
packagers go further and autoreconf their packages for every build, to
verify that if build-system changes are later needed for a bugfix, they'll
work.)

See this mail from Piotr Ożarowski (who packages a large proportion of the
Python modules in Debian), which lists "use waf as build-system" alongside
"release different tarballs with the same version number" (!) among things
to avoid:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev python org/msg47681.html

Regards,
    Simon