Re: Moving away from make

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Freitag, 12. August 2011, 15:53:56 schrieb Phil Holmes:
> I understand it's been discussed before, but I am wondering whether it's
> worth thinking the unthinkable and considering moving away from make.

I suppose that everyone here would be glad if we could get away from make. 
It's just that our build system is really, really complicated and very 
complex, including dozens of different functionalities, different handling of 
the same file type depending on the directory, etc.


> I've done 5 minutes research and have found SCons.  I've not gone into any
> more depth with that yet.  Does it seem worth looking into this, or
> something else, in more detail?

Jan did some work ok building lilypond with scons from 2004-2007. All traces 
of that have been removed 2009 by John in commit 
24cd9ffc8b5a4ea03a29414eb7ae038a2d568d45.

Another candidate would be cmake, which is used by the KDE project, so it is 
also able to handle large projects.

I don't know, however, whether any of those is really able to provide the 
functionality that we really want/need (bin/doc/web/check/test-baseline 
builds, cross-compiling for GUB, etc.)

Cheers,
Reinhold

PS: There was also some discussion on -devel to use waf, but IIRC that's 
lacking some vital features.
PS2: When KDE switched to cmake, they initially favored SCons, but that was 
not up to the task of building KDE, so they finally ended up with cmake. See 
http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/
-- 
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Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org