[PATCH] Re: serious doubts about waf

[John Mandereau]

Le mardi 10 novembre 2009 à 23:34 +0000, Graham Percival a écrit :
> The basic problem is that waf doesn't like to have directories in the
> build tree that aren't present in the source tree.  After asking for
> help, the main author pointed out a not-really-documented function
> that allowed me to create an extra directory:
>     
> http://groups.google.com/group/waf-users/browse_thread/thread/1e3774fdf387e083
> 
> However, this special function doesn't seem to work instantaneously...
> or else I'm doing something really weird in
> Documentation/wscript_build

After hours of debugging and code inspection, I think you did nothing
weird, it's a bug in Waf code: Node.py:Node.find_dir(), which looks up
directories, call bld.rescan() which among others removes nodes of
directories that haven't been yet created, like our call to
bld.path.ensure_dir_node_from_path.

Does the attached patch convince you to go on on Waf? I'm not going to
do more Waf advocacy that I already did, because you may rightly accuse
me of fluffing around :-)

I'm following this up on waf-users too...


> In the discussion (shown in the above link), it turns out that the waf
> API is going to change in version 1.6.  This new version is only in
> the planning stages; no code exists for it... but I'm really starting
> to question if we really want to use waf.  I have to admit that I was
> really shaken by the directory thing.  I assumed that since it was
> python, I could do anything that python could do -- so making
> directories, moves files from directory to directory, etc. would be
> easy.  Apparently not.

It's not easy because custom directories and files management has to be
done in a suitable place in a build system, and as you just discovered
Waf has much less support for this that we'd naturally expect for
building docs the way we want.

Best,
John

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