Re: build systems

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

Alp,

I agree that you can learn by tutorials and documentation.  I certainly
have and it didn't seem that hard to me.  In fact, I picked up auto*
faster than I did SCons and whatever that new one was that KDE folks
were using.  That said, Richard isn't the only one that is cutting
pieces from other projects and trying to get it all working.  I would
guess that very few GNOME developers actually know how the auto* build
tools work and that most of them are doing the same thing as Richard.
Nobody has the patience to deal with autotools.

I think later in this thread it was suggested that we convert a couple
of modules and see how it goes.  Those who have a passion to change it
should do it and help create the infrastructure and migration path to
use the new build system and for godsakes document it.

sri

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 23:03 +0000, Alp Toker wrote:
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> >> - 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.
> 
> Hate to be devil's advocate here but maybe you'd be better equipped to 
> fix your build system if you read the documentation instead of blindly 
> copying chunks of configure.ac out of other projects and hoping it works?
> 
> Seriously.
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-- 
Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>