Re: Moving away from make

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 02:53:56PM +0100, Phil Holmes wrote:
> I understand it's been discussed before, but I am wondering whether
> it's worth thinking the unthinkable and considering moving away from
> make.

Budget 2000 hours.  That's not a typo.  I don't think it provides
a good cost/benefit ratio.

Another problem is that every build system sucks.  I've tried
scons, waf, and cmake.  Out of all of those, cmake is the least
icky, but I hate that they invented Yet Another Scripting Language
and don't let me do stuff with the simplicity and elegance of
python.

waf looks the nicest at first glance, but they don't support
having files with the same name in the source tree and build tree,
and I was appalled at their attitude ("you shouldn't want to do
that").  The job of the build system is to do whatever we need;
being told that we shouldn't want to view html documents, or that
we should change our directory structure, does not impress me.
Look for previous discussion about this in the archives, and if
you're interested, you could try to talk some sense into the waf
people.

> I know it's been used in loads of projects and is much loved,
> but actually, from a design perspective, it's appalling.

Oh, make is a disaster.  But the sad thing is that it's less of a
disaster than those other major contenders.

I've heard rumors of a google build system; if that's open-source,
it might be a possible contender.  But failing that, I think we're
stuck.

Cheers,
- Graham