Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 15 February 2005 20:55, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 February 2005 00:34, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> > On Tuesday 15 February 2005 00:53, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> > > Why would an IDE need to parse it ? It only needs to generate it.
> >
> > Not really. If you take a look at all builtool support plugins in KDevelop
> > you will found that at least two of them (autotools and qmake)
> > _do_ 1) parse 2) modify and 3) write changes back to the project files.
> > Makefile.am parser and modifier is actually implemented simpler than the
> > one for qmake's .pro files ;)
> 
> Well, I still fail to understand why on earth would they do that, except for 
> initial project import.

To play nice with those who don't use the IDE.
The KDE CVS is a very nice example of that. If I'm not allowed to fix a Makefile.am
because "it was generated by kdevelop and any changes here will be overwritten",
then this is a big problem. I haven't seen it happen (despite the warning in 
the Makefile.am) so either no KDE CVS developers uses KDevelop (which I doubt),
or, more likely, the "import Makefile.am" feature works.

In any case, whether for "initial import" or "importing every time", parsing
the Makefile.am or scons file is necessary.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).