Re: strawman (Was Re: build systems)

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

On 12/11/2007, Ali Sabil <ali sabil gmail com> 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 agree with you concerning this, and if you took time to check, WAF
already have an xml representation using wscript_xml files iirc.

The problem with declarative approaches is that you cannot easily
integrate configure checks, WAF solves this by allowing python
snippets to be included for the configure check.

Eh, why not?

<check package="glib-2.0" minimalVersion="2.12"/>

Other more advanced constructs (such as checking for a specific Python package or other) can be implemented with a plugin system like Ant have, or other means.

I think we should really investigate WAF, and how to make use of the
XML representation to integrate with let's say Eclipse ?

Yes, the Waf XML representation should definitely be examined.


Cheers,
Mikkel