Re: [gpsd-dev] Changing build systems

[Bernd Ocklin]

On 2015-03-26 03:20, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

[...]
> > - Handle cross building without having to specify all tools you want to use -
> > specifying the target architecture should be enough.
> I don't think this goal is realistic; there's still too much toolchain
> variation.  But I know someone who routinely does cross-builds for OpenWRT;
I have been doing this daily for some years now. I ship gpsd as part of 
my hardware router project. Its a non-issue as OpenWRT provides the 
scons integration for you.

However, only a complete clean & compile cycle is supported on OpenWRT. 
This requires you to tar your sources into the OpenWRT local download 
repository and recompile it from scratch for every minor code change in 
the package. I spent an evening or two in the crude OpenWRT toolchain in 
order to see if I was just stupid or if there was a simple to fix issue. 
Haven't found an obvious answer though and gave up as I mostly develop 
in the PC environment anyways.

> I will discuss it with him.
>
> > - Handle  stuff like importing flags from the environment. We have crap like
> > for i in ["AR", "ARFLAGS", "CCFLAGS", "CFLAGS", "CC", "CXX", "CXXFLAGS",
> > "LINKFLAGS", "STRIP", "PKG_CONFIG", "CHRPATH", "LD", "TAR"]:
> >      if os.environ.has_key(i):
> >          ....
> Reasonable, if mostly syntactic sugar.
Started testing gpsd on AM355x Cortex A8. Since I just unpacked the 
pre-built cross compiler into a random dir I had to set all the above 
flags in the environment. My own fault. But I don't find the above crap, 
it is simple boiler plate 2-liner, not an issue.

Since I am already writing a quick comment:

In my day job we gave up on auto-tools. Autotools lead to an 
unmaintainable Unix-bound build system. Only a few were able to somehow 
mange it and nobody really understood it. We don't miss it.

I personally don't like languages requiring correct indentation in order 
to work. And scons is far from perfect. But it does its job. And its 
advantage is exactly that its a framework that every idiot like me can 
easily understand. I don't need to be a phd in release engineering and 
can solve problems in scons by writing own code using basic programming 
skills. And unlike CMake, auto-* or others scons does a one-command 
configure & compile-job.

Or in summary: Build job done. Back to actually interesting technical 
GPS and protocol issues.

My .02$.

Another Bernd