Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Kevin Puetz]

Adam Treat wrote:

> On Saturday 19 February 2005 11:25 am, Kevin Puetz wrote:
>> that's the right place. But a build system that has a real programming
>> language is going to be nigh impossible to automatically edit, so the
>> fact that it becomes essentially read-only to IDEs is a tradeoff to be
>> considered...
> 
> Uhm, I think it is not a tradeoff that can even be remotely considered.
> KDevelop's users will scream bloody murder if they lose the functionality
> to
> edit their build system through a convenient GUI and rightly so.  Every
> other IDE in existence has this ability, so if the greater project decides
> to go this way, KDevelop will have to continue with QMake or Auto* based
> templates.

Well, KDevelop could handle writing to SCons files that obeyed additional
requirements; it seems feasible to find unconditional "here's the source
files" directives, or it could even use a more Makefile.am-like form where
it the lists are in variables and the code that uses them is an included
template. In reality, this is where it's currently at with automake anyway;
unless I'm far wrong, I doubt kdevelop can handle all the custom rules and
other things that are possible.

> KDevelop3's ability to integrate with regular KDE cvs projects as a major
> plus.  It would be a shame to see that go away.

I just wanted to throw out there the idea of running it and looking at the
resulting plan; that would be a way of making it reliably able to at least
open such project files, even if it can't fully grok the available
conditional logic.