Comments on: Build systems and version control

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:29:47 +0000

I should add that there are no plans to drop autotools support any time soon; they will be kept in parallel and the tests will apply to both.

By: Mart Raudsepp

Mart Raudsepp — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:38:34 +0000

I don’t see WAF ready for C applications anytime soon, especially in the areas of cross-compilation and coping with all the various (exotic) platforms GNOME does build on succesfully thanks to autotools. I will elaborate on all this soon on desktop-devel-list or somewhere visible (just need to find the time for doing more research for facts and necessities and to write it all up), as it seems to be a premature hype for many GNOME projects, that seems to foil all my plans to make sure most of GNOME is cross-compilable and usable with uclibc until it does get all these features.

By: Yair Hershkovitz

Yair Hershkovitz — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:13:00 +0000

No circularity :). If it’s really good then new projects will use it and projects who –really need– a ‘better’ autotools system will make a switch. Eventually it should have an established user base.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:03:24 +0000

@Havoc: Is the problem that it makes people think of Family Guy, or that it makes people sink without trace?

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:55:47 +0000

@Yair: “We should wait until waf is… commonly used”; I detect a circularity problem here. :)

By: Yair Hershkovitz

Yair Hershkovitz — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:28:22 +0000

What exactly can’t we do with autotools that waf can do?

There should be a really good reason why to spend resources when there is no issue that is being solved.

Waf is faster (?) and is it’s probably easier to write extensions in python then in m4, but we should wait until waf is production quality, well tested and commonly used before doing this switch.

By: Emanuele aina

Emanuele aina — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:50:11 +0000

Why not use mercurial, then?

It’s fast and powerful as git (expecially if you use mq) and it’s simple and comfrotable as bazaar.

To be honest, as I use bazaar for my job, I can say first hand that mercurial is even more comfortable than bazaar. :)

Check the wiki page about distributed SCM for further information.

By: Havoc

Havoc — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:09:47 +0000

Hmm, two advocacy wars in one post…

What about Quagmire? Tom recognizes the nature of the problem in his choice of names ;-)

By: Adam Petaccia

Adam Petaccia — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:52:59 +0000

Another cheer for git! Its fast, and small, and actually makes more sense to me (not like I matter, though).

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:41:09 +0000

bzr has came a LONG way recently. That being said, git is still faster in most things. For a project the size of metacity, bzr would probably fit perfectly. That being said, git is still faster.

Laserjock and I got in a discussion about git vs bzr in #ubuntu-kernel and this was his response.
http://laserjock.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/bzr-git-and-hg-performance-on-the-linux-tree/

waf is pretty, and fast. It has a few bugs, but upstream is very interested in helping out in fixing them. Since open source is about choice, why not try out waf and enable it in jhbuild? Let the best build system win!