Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Dirk Mueller]

On Saturday 19 February 2005 16:05, Guillaume Laurent wrote:

> 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.

I don't had a look at the RG build system.. but we do have 
$(KDE_USE_EXCEPTIONS) in quite some places in KDE as well and there was not a 
single reported problem so far. I don't doubt that there might be a bug in 
your build system regarding this issue. 

> 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.

Well, thats a solution.. but do you really think scons will make tracing bugs 
easier? if so, why exactly? 

> 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.

you can do things in a maintainable way already, if you really have to. 


-- 
Dirk//\