Extremely poor quality of KWave's build system

[Ben Cooksley]

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
> El dimarts, 23 de maig de 2017, a les 19:53:29 CEST, Ben Cooksley va escriure:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been working on the new CI system recently, and as part of this
>> have run into a few issues with some projects. Most of these have been
>> easily resolved.
>>
>> KWave however is another ball park entirely and has to date cost at
>> least 5 base system image rebuilds (quite likely higher) and quite a
>> bit of time. After all that I still haven't got it to pass the
>> configure stage. This is due to it's build system failing immediately
>> as soon as it fails to find a single dependency.
>>
>> This is improper behaviour for a build system, which should check for
>> everything, then give a listing of hard required and suggested
>> dependencies which are missing before bailing out. From what i'm told
>> this is due to severe abuse of the FindPkgConfig() macro that CMake
>> provides.
>>
>> Thomas, can you please (completely) rewrite the whole CMake build
>> system KWave uses to behave correctly?
>>
>> I'm revoking KWave's CI privileges from this point forward as I don't
>> want to waste any further time on this.
>
> Let me try to comment on the wording of this email first.

Sure.

>
> I think this is not the correct way to handle the problem.
>
> If you can't get ultra-frustrated and then say "fuckit i'm banning you from
> CI", that lowers a lot motivation on the other side because you didn't even
> gave them the possibility of "defending" themselves.

Fair enough.

>
> I think a more positive way would have been to stop before you get ultra-
> frustrated and say something like "I can't get this to work, please have a
> look, if this doesn't get fixed in X days we may have to think about removing
> kwave from CI".
>
> In essence "it's the same", but wording matters.
>
> On the actual problem, as a workaround, have you tried "apt-get build-dep
> kwave" or the "synonymous" command in whatever OS the image you're using has?

I generally tend to avoid those commands as they usually want to drag
in all of Frameworks and other KDE supplied dependencies.
One tends to end up cherry picking just a couple of packages from the
list which isn't always that easy (KDE packages tend to dominate the
list) and ends up taking longer.
This image was a Fedora one for those interested.

>
> Cheers,
>   Albert
>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Ben Cooksley
>> KDE Sysadmin
>
>

Cheers,
Ben