Re: Please review: Brain surgery on the build system, first stage

[John Mandereau]

Le lundi 06 août 2012 à 14:08 +0100, Graham Percival a écrit :
> They have a 0.9.8.6 release candidate 1 -- from 2010 Oct 26.  That
> doesn't inspire confidence.  Is there a more up-to-date website
> for recent development

Nope.


> , or is this now unsupported software?

It's not developed very actively (that's an euphemism), and traffic on
their mailing list is low (see http://lists.metaprl.org/pipermail/omake/
9 messages in one month and a half! but on the plus side all requests
for support have been answered); this inactivity is likely not a sign of
abandonment, but of a slow increase of the user base, and developers
being involved in other business.  However, I tend to say: don't be
misled by this, this looks like a very good piece of software, written
in a clean and maintainable language.


> We also still have the dev/waf branch if you want to take a look
> at that.  :)

No, I don't want, at least not in the near future.  Waf is complex,
Python isn't on the good side for performance (vs. GNU Make written in C
or Omake written in OCaml), and I'm afraid we won't end up with
something simpler than our current StepMake.  As you see with my patch
for changing dist, I favour the route of cleaning up our build system,
so hopefully if/when we decide to support another build system we'll
have first a better picture of how to build LilyPond, and maintain with
less hassle support for building LilyPond with GNU Make.

Best,
John