Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 16 February 2005 23:27, Esben Mose Hansen wrote:
> On Thursday 2005-02-17 05:28, Mike Richardson wrote:
> > > BTW with scons+bksys, kparts are built this way :
> > >
> > > myenv.SharedLibrary( target = "libtest3part.so", source =
> > > test3part_sources ) myenv.LaFile( target = "libtest3part", source =
> > > "libtest3part.so" )
> > >
> > > I think it wouldn't take much work to reduce this to a single line :-).
> 
> That syntax is much better than the earlier scons (or cmake) example. I 
> dislike positional arguments.

Still, hardcoding ".so" is hardly portable (e.g. to native Windows).

Anyway, to step back a bit and look at the alternatives, in my opinion
the problem with the current build system is admin/ and autoconf,
but not the Makefile.am syntax itself, which is quite easy, which we all
know by now and which I documented on developer.kde.org for (hopefully) 
all KDE needs.

How about we keep Makefile.am, but use unsermake (as a dependency,
which has to be installed first - no admin/ copies; oh, and with a better
name of course). And for the configure part, using something like what
scons provides - so that it's python all the way through.
python can't be more scary than m4/autoconf macros, and for simple 
things we can simply write a Makefile.am, as always.

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