Re: serious doubts about waf

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2009-11-11, Graham Percival wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 06:36:37PM -0800, Patrick McCarty wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Graham Percival
> > <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:34:35PM +0000, Graham Percival wrote:
> > >> I'm just about ready to give up on waf.
> > >
> > > As Jan put it, "a new build system should be a breath of fresh
> > > air".  I'm not feeling fresh.
> > 
> > Though I haven't been following these discussions very closely, I have
> > looked into automake a little bit.  It sounds like we could make it
> > work.  At least, I think it would simplify makefile maintenance once
> > we have initially set everything up.
> 
> What's the advantage of automake over the current system?  (I'm
> not even certain what the current system is called!)

I don't have much experience *using* automake, but from what I've
read:

  - A Makefile.am is easier to maintain than an equivalent handcoded
    makefile.
  - The generated makefiles will be very portable (not reliant on GNU
    make).
  - Automake integrates well with Autoconf, probably more so than the
    current stepmake system.

> I used to maintain it (and the duplicate qmake build system) for
> marsyas before I got so annoyed at having two build systems and
> switched to cmake.  Given that windows users couldn't use
> automake, I'm not certain it's worth the effort of switching to
> it.

Well, there's always the option of keeping the generated Makefile.in
files alongside the Makefile.am automake files in the source tree.
Then Windows users should be able to build stuff if they have some
incarnation of "make" of their system, since Automake-generated
makefiles do not depend on GNU Make.

-Patrick