Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Tuesday 15 February 2005 22:23, David Faure wrote:
> 
> > 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.

They can always export the project settings, do whatever changes are required, 
and import back. Parsing a human-readable file format is bound to be 
unreliable, unless you go the whole way and re-implement the language. So you 
have to choose between two evils, really. If KDevelop has been working "well 
enough" with Makefile.am importing, all the better. But I don't think it 
would be a good idea to go this way with another build system, be it scons or 
cmake.

> 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.

Not to be overly pessimistic here, but I'd rather say the former.

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

Yes, but parsing an scons file can be made trivial.

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