On 12/11/2007, Nicolas Trangez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 22:41 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote: > > However, the most important point for this discussion is that this > > approach makes it hard to provide a high-level UI a'la Eclipse or Visual > > Studio which is what many many people are used to. One way to do this is > > to use a declarative programming language (e.g. XML) to express the > > build process. > I'm somewhat afraid when using XML to express a build process you'll end > up with a pretty complex schema (I know Ant and similar, don't forget > building a Java or .Net project is much simpeler than > $RANDOM_C_LIBRARY), so complex the only way to edit your build file > *will* be to use some IDE. > > > > Of course, being a realist, it's naive to believe that such a > > declarative language would be able to cover all of free software and > > replace autotools in general. However, if you consider just GNOME, > > perhaps it's possible to come up with a short and sweet declarative > > language. If we had that we could use it in at least three ways > > > > - We could have a dedicated GNOME program that interpreted these build > > recipes and built binaries for you. > > > > - It would be straightforward (I didn't say easy) to write Eclipse, > > Visual Studio, Xcode etc. With this developers would never need > > to touch a shell. Certainly this is a big selling point. > > > > - Another program could generate configure.in, Makefile.am etc. for > > rolling distribution tarballs. This would satisfy the requirements > > for e.g. being able to build only if you have make(1), gcc(1) and > > core UNIX utilities around. > > > > So the proposal here would be to roll our own build system that is > > highly optimized only for GNOME/GTK+ applications. Thoughts? > While I do agree using some declarative language to describe a build > process is useful for IDE integration, I think this wouldn't be a gain > for maintainers not using any IDE, as maintaining the build files would > be rather hard (does anyone who doesn't use some IDE with integrated > build-system support use Ant and writes his ant files in $EDITOR?).
Yes I do. A lot. While Ant (and just about any XML representation of build instructions) will be quite verbose compared to a Makefile.am, they are quite a lot easier to debug, both because XML errors and schema compliance errors can be described quite precisely by the build system. If > we'd want to have build support in IDE's I guess we can easily stick to > ant (which is a de-facto "standard" afaik, next to MS vcproj and alike) > and provide GTK+/GNOME-specific Ant tasks. Ant contains some Java'isms which I don't like. As stated in another thread on d-d-l; in my perfect build system the syntax of the build recipes will be completely decoupled from the implementation of the build system. That way we also use auto*, waf or ant or <xyz> to implement the actual build system, and change that at any point in the future if we see the need. Cheers, Mikkel
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