Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Stephan Kulow]

Am Monday 14 February 2005 17:02 schrieb Guillaume Laurent:
> The current build system is *way* scarier IMHO :-).
I hope that's what most people think, otherwise it's not worth the effort.
> 
> 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.
> 
autoconf-like describes it pretty nicely. I have seen blender's "configure" and I 
must say I'm not heartfully convinced it's the easier to maintain system.

But the "Configuration files are Python scripts--use the power of a real programming
language to solve build problems." argument from scons.org (and I have that on my
radar for much longer than bksys exists) is the key here. Neither m4 nor POSIX shell
are the languages we should let people write their build system enhancements in.
Whatever you might think about python, it's far better to have a powerful scripting language 
than those we use so far. 

Scons hasn't really good support for complex configure tests, nor does it have support
for distcc/icecream, nor does it have good support for srcdir!=builddir (or can you claim
otherwise with rosegarden? I only read the manual). But having had a glimpse in scons's
code, this might be fixable.

Greetings, Stephan