Initial support for kde_projects.xml in kdesrc-build

Michael Pyne mpyne at kde.org
Wed Feb 2 04:35:08 GMT 2011


On Tuesday, February 01, 2011 19:14:34 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> Once you know it puts that into the PATHS option the rest is a mere look
> at the cmake manual

As soon as you mentioned having to dive into the CMake manual to make 
something work you have lost a fair amount of bleeding edge testers for KDE, 
or your app, or whatever it is you're trying to get built.

Tools like build-tool and kdesrc-build aren't just for developers who already 
know how to dive through CMake failure logs (kdesrc-build is so dated that 
unsermake was the new hotness when I started writing it, back when it was 
called kdecvs-build).

When did making it easy to build KDE become controversial again? Do we also 
expect to go back to the days in C when we had to manually construct and 
destroy objects and use macros for collections?

I don't think Michael was ever claiming that you can't or shouldn't use CMake 
directly. After all his recipes use CMake themselves. What he *is* saying is 
that performing a build of a full desktop is certainly harder than "simply" 
running a source update, cmake, and make. (And in case it's not clear, I 
completely agree)

e.g. worrying about environment variables like PKG_CONFIG_PATH is no idle 
claim (kdesrc-build sets that as well), along with PATH in order to pick up 
the right Qt version.

As another example, what happens when the random user ends up with a 
magically-locked svn repo? Is he going to know that he has to run 'svn 
cleanup'? He probably won't, but kdesrc-build will. Likewise, (for svn modules 
at least) kdesrc-build will tell the user directly if there somehow ended up 
being a source conflict instead of the user finding out something is up from a 
bunch of build errors.

Worse yet, what happens when you make that manual CMake run but you forgot to 
set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. If you do that on a module like kdepim you might waste 
an hour building before the install fails due to lack of root permissions, 
whereas with build-tool or kdesrc-build the desired install path is set in one 
spot, and the script won't forget to set it.

Much of the history of computing is devoted to automating repetitive tasks. 
Why is this one task so different that it doesn't warrant automating? :)

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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