Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Guillaume Laurent]

Stephan Kulow wrote:
>
> I would like to clean up the build system majorly and surely would like to 
> finish it before KDE4. I have tons of ideas and would like to basically start 
> from scratch - what tools would we have choosen if we had started now? Don't 
> say qmake, I won't believe you. Anyway: different thread, but surely a lot of 
> work, that also includes the risk of scaring people away. Answer this: what 
> is more scary: the current build system or the idea of throwing anything you 
> know about the current build system away? 

The current build system is *way* scarier IMHO :-).

To repeat my post on kde-devel regarding scons and bksys 
(http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=19243) :

It took me about half a day to get Rosegarden (some autoconf checks, two 
libs, DCOP interfaces, >200LOC) to build with scons+bksys, this with 
very little previous Python experience and no scons experience at all. 
The SConscript files are very simple, and much easier to understand than 
the corresponding Makefile.am.

As far as I know, scons is the only build system which also has 
autoconf-like features. bksys adds the all the kde-only bits we need, so 
IMHO it's very much worth a look.

-- 
Guillaume
http://telegraph-road.org