Re: A Gtk's build system ?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 5 August 2014 14:35, Victor Aurélio Santos
<victoraur santos gmail com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Is there a plan to write a new build system or use another existing
> build system for Gtk instead of Autotools ?

the short answer is: no.

the long(er) answer implies talking about integration with build
services, distributions, installers, portability, cross-compilation,
and other stuff.

in short: implementing a (modern) build environment that does what
people use build environments for is a *massive* undertaking, and in
the end you're going to reimplement something already existing, very
likely a worse version of autotools.

> I ask this because autotools is something "not good enough" for me.
> It's syntax is ugly and bad to remember, the platform that will run
> autotools requires a UNIX tool-set (sh, make, etc...), there's no
> support to glib's features like resources the developer have manually
> find the glib-compile-resources executable and write rules to build
> the resources, and so on.

all this stuff can be solved by conventions, macros, and templates.

the GNOME Builder talk at GUADEC also presented autotools integration
that was based on convention and would simplify creating and
maintaining autotools-based projects, using "fig"[1] as a prototype.

> I also think that Gtk should have something "Gtk's build system", Like
> Qt's qmake.

qmake is actually replaced by cmake, which is fairly generic, though
obviously that also implies verbosity and corner cases.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[1] https://github.com/chergert/fig

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