Extremely poor quality of KWave's build system

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimarts, 23 de maig de 2017, a les 19:53:29 CEST, Ben Cooksley va escriure:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been working on the new CI system recently, and as part of this
> have run into a few issues with some projects. Most of these have been
> easily resolved.
> 
> KWave however is another ball park entirely and has to date cost at
> least 5 base system image rebuilds (quite likely higher) and quite a
> bit of time. After all that I still haven't got it to pass the
> configure stage. This is due to it's build system failing immediately
> as soon as it fails to find a single dependency.
> 
> This is improper behaviour for a build system, which should check for
> everything, then give a listing of hard required and suggested
> dependencies which are missing before bailing out. From what i'm told
> this is due to severe abuse of the FindPkgConfig() macro that CMake
> provides.
> 
> Thomas, can you please (completely) rewrite the whole CMake build
> system KWave uses to behave correctly?
> 
> I'm revoking KWave's CI privileges from this point forward as I don't
> want to waste any further time on this.

Let me try to comment on the wording of this email first.

I think this is not the correct way to handle the problem. 

If you can't get ultra-frustrated and then say "fuckit i'm banning you from 
CI", that lowers a lot motivation on the other side because you didn't even 
gave them the possibility of "defending" themselves.

I think a more positive way would have been to stop before you get ultra-
frustrated and say something like "I can't get this to work, please have a 
look, if this doesn't get fixed in X days we may have to think about removing 
kwave from CI".

In essence "it's the same", but wording matters.

On the actual problem, as a workaround, have you tried "apt-get build-dep 
kwave" or the "synonymous" command in whatever OS the image you're using has?

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Regards,
> Ben Cooksley
> KDE Sysadmin