Re: waf building

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 01:04:11AM +0100, John Mandereau wrote:
> Le samedi 07 novembre 2009 à 19:26 +0000, Graham Percival a écrit :
> > 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).

If I'm working on the LM, then I *don't* want other stuff be
built.  That goes especially for the CG and
general/web/whatever-the-word-of-the-week-is, since they don't
require lilypond-book.

Yes, ideally the build system will only do the manuals that have
been touched... but what about starting from a blank git checkout?
It would suck to spend 2 hours building all the docs when you just
want to check that a typo correction in the French translation of
the website looks good.

Also, it might make the parallel building easier.

Put it another way: why *not* have them as separate tasks?

> > 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.

It will be designed enough.  It will be designed so much that,
when it is done, you will look at it and say "wow, that is
designed".

> > *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.

I'm mostly just pissed about the "blddir" stupidness.  It's not
the 1970s, folks!  Adding the "ui" won't cause the source file to
be too large for the punch card!  Besides, one of python's claims
to fame is that it's more readable than most other languages.  Why
the bloody mao would they throw that away to have stupid variable
names like "blddir" ?!?!


Ok, I'll go ahead with this.  My mood will suffer, and therefore
anybody on the lists with a thin skin will _also_ suffer, but at
the end of two weeks we'll have a doc build system that will make
people say "wow, that is designed".

- Graham