Hello, I would like to voice protest over the AOSP build system switch from Make to Soong. Make is not a perfect tool but it is well documented and extremely stable. The introduction of ninja into AOSP was seamless and acceptable. However, migrating away from Make to a totally new tool with zero history is a serious set back. Why not instead choose Bazel, Tup, Gradle, Buck or simply stick with what works?
I read the following statements from one of the developers of Soong build: > One of our goals for build health is to reduce the number of different > ways we build modules. Adding too many build flags makes it harder to > tell if a change will break the build, and hard to run tests. We > would much rather compiling everything the same on all devices, and > then determine which parts to use at runtime. It is unclear what is meant by "reduce the number of different ways we build modules.", nor is it clear what is meant by "We would much rather compiling everything the same on all devices". This seems to conflict with the example of LLVM where the build basically consists of completely custom go code: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/llvm/+/master/soong/llvm.go Clearly this custom go code does not reduce the number of different ways modules are built. I assume this is an attempt to improve build performance yet again, but it ends up wasting thousands of engineering hours across the globe. Engineers must figure out a new system that likely contains numerous bugs and could possibly be destined for the dustbin if it is not maintained properly or turns out to be inferior. If the goal is to improve build performance perhaps Google engineers could explore an under-the-hood contribution to Make itself? Android is mature; it deserves a mature build system. Jacob Abrams -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Android Building" mailing list. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-building?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Building" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
