Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Saturday 19 February 2005 15:37, Dirk Mueller wrote:
>
> quickly rots and think about 5 years from now if we can add hacks to every
> little short-time problem, then complexity *will* explode.

From where I stand, complexity *has* exploded already. To take a recent 
example : just a few weeks ago, someone on the RG mailing list had to deal 
with a missing '-fexception' flag, even though it's specified in our 
Makefile.am. This problem has happened repeatedly, mostly at random, for many 
people ever since RG development started under KDE. That's 5 YEARS.

For 5 years we've been having a recurrent problem with our build system which 
we simply can't explain, mostly because the very idea of tracing it gives us 
the creeps, and we'd rather hack the resulting Makefile by hand whenever it 
happens.

> so if there is the possibility to plug in another configure system after we
> cleaned up our mess and structured it better, then we should do that. but
> don't try to solve problems that don't exist - our build system *is*
> flexible enough.. it is easy to use for things that are easy, and complex
> to use for things that should be rare (like conditional compiles for small
> issues). This is a *good* thing, because it will help keep things clean and
> maintainable.

Quite the contrary I think this will backfire, like it already has. People 
will hack the buildsystem anyway, but it will be even uglier because of the 
crippled language. I'd rather have a build system which lets you do whatever 
you like in a maintainable way, if you really have to.

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