Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Simone Gotti]

On Monday 14 February 2005 15:07, Stephan Kulow wrote:
>   - new_build_system_branch - as long as nothing compiles, I would like to
>     have it branched. I guess you agree.

I have some (very personal and also probably wrong) thoughts on the build 
system.

Probably gcc 3.4 has again some bugs in PCH (Precompiled Headers), (for this 
reason it was added and then removed from QT), but I hope that with gcc 4 all 
the issues (if not already, I'm not very informed) will be fixed.

I think that the compilation time during a development of a kde application is 
important as it's quite boring to test every little change waiting for the 
compilation and probably we'll gain more developers also for this reason.

It will be very good if the build system can let the developers to easily 
manage the PCHs. Unsermake has an initial support in it but it should be 
improved.

If we want to use PCH to speed up development compilation times the choosed 
header must be the external one to the current kde module.(i.e. the QT 
headers for kdelibs, and the kdelibs headers for the other modules), so they 
can be compiled only one time and then no more (if we don't change kdelibs of 
course).

Also as some sources uses different compilation directives (like some defines 
-D....) there should be one PCH file for every combination (probably they 
aren't a lot and possibly they can be reduced where possible) but not a 
different PCH for every subdirectory as is done now with unsermake.

Also some source files cannot be compiled with PCH so there should be a 
Makefile (or what it will be called) directive that will let us disable the 
use of PCH for these files.


If other people thinks that the PCHs are important then the choose of the 
future build system should depend also on this factor.

Probably there are more person more expert than me on the PCHs side, and I'd 
be happy to hear their comments.

Bye!
-- 
Simone Gotti - Gentoo Developer
<simone.gotti at email.it> - <motaboy at gentoo.org>
http://kde-bluetooth.sf.net
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