Re: waf building

[John Mandereau]

Le samedi 07 novembre 2009 à 19:26 +0000, Graham Percival a écrit :
> I've got waf buliding contributor .html and .pdf  in the dev/gperciva
> branch.

Ah, you got upset enough by the old build system too :-)


> I was pleasantly surprised to discover that waf supported a
> --targets=  command-line, so we can specific an individual manual to
> build.

I'm not sure specifying an individual manual to build should be done in
a target; in an ideal docs building system, it should be easy to choose
independently the output format, the manuals that are compiled, and the
offline/online output targets.  Maybe "doc" would remain the target
name, and other parameters could be set as other command-line options as
you suggest, or in environment variables (probably not useful in this
case).


>   I'm less happy that this appears to ignore the "after=foo"
> check, so none of the dependencies are checked.

Shouldn't the dependencies which are source files wrt the task be
included in 'source' rather than 'after'?  I'll try to work it out.
Maybe 'after' should contains tasks rather than nodes (sources files)
anyway, but this is not a firm claim.


> Actually, I suppose we could add a custom command-line option for
> building specific manuals (*with* their dependencies), so I guess this
> isn't such a big deal.

Sure.


> Bottom line: if we actually want waf, it can be done within two weeks.
>
> At least, the non-translated stuff can be done within two weeks.  I'm
> *not* going to screw around with the translations.

If the build system for docs in English is well designed enough, it will
be little work to make it work for translations.  I must deal with
translations before the next stable release, otherwise my translations
coordinator job will no longer make any sense :-P
Anyway, as somebody, i.e. you, finally got his hands dirty with waf, I'm
motivated again to work on it.


> *if* we want waf.  As I said, I remain unconvinced.

I'm willing to support alternatives to our build system and SCons other
than waf, if you can show me one.  Waf is certainly not a very mature
build system, but I think it has solid enough bare bones to try it.

Best,
John

signature.asc
Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée