Build system (was Re: Future of KDE Development)

[Stephan Kulow]

Am Sunday 20 February 2005 15:22 schrieb Fred Schaettgen:
> A simple input format only works well for simple problems, and it starts 
> getting nasty if you can't express a solution for a given build problem 
> easily in the terms of this simple input format.

There were hardly any problems so far that couldn't be solved if you know
how it all works. The problem of course starts to become dramatically if
the system is very complex - as our current one unargueably is.

That doesn't mean scons is 100% easy. If a problem rises up, you have to 
solve it somehow. And as a matter of fact the first reaction to bksys on
kde-apps was around "ok, that's fine - but what if I want to do a kio slave".
If scons is all that easy, why wasn't that straightforward? I tell you: because
people won't ever try to understand a system 100% before they try to solve
problems, but look how other people solved similiar problems. So in the end,
it only comes down to having enough examples around (and Makefile.ams
have a decent head start here ;) and having tools that solve the easy cases
(we have that for Makefile.am). 

So I for one would love to have a flexible (and high level) build description
language, I can see Davids and Dirks fear that it will be too hard to maintain.
Even though it wouldn't be that much of a concern to me. So I'm still very open
minded where to head to, but I need to have time to explore this in detail and
don't have that time yet.

Greetings, Stephan