Re: A Gtk's build system ?

[Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk pl gmail com>]

2014-08-06 21:43 GMT+02:00 Colomban Wendling <lists ban herbesfolles org>:
> Le 06/08/2014 21:30, Krzysztof Kosiński a écrit :
> > [Waf] does not require silly lists of files to work
>
> If that refers to using globs in the build system files, don't.  Glob
> showed on many a situation to be the source of various build problems,
> including, but not limited to, a file to be missing from the source tree
> (which would not be easily noticeable and would work on the author's
> setup), or unexpected files to be included in a build.

I am not really convinced by this.

1. If there are any uncommitted files, version control will tell you about this.
2. If you have 'unexpected files' in the source tree, you are doing
something wrong.
3. Another common argument in favor of file lists is determining what
to include in the tarball. This is only an issue because by default
Autotools create a giant mess by putting generated files in the same
directories as the sources (CMake does this as well). Waf always puts
all generated files in a separate directory, so everything that's not
in the build directory should be distributed.

> Also, FWIW patterns can generally be used just fine in Autotools -- but
> again, please, don't use them.

Autotools can't correctly use patterns / wildcards, because it
requires manually re-running automake whenever a file is added or
deleted.
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Wildcards.html
Waf stores a database of files seen on last build and therefore
doesn't suffer from this problem.

Regards, Krzysztof