On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 01:38:22PM -0700, Gregory Szorc wrote: > On 8/22/12 1:00 PM, Ben Hearsum wrote: > >On 08/22/12 12:43 PM, Jeff Hammel wrote: > >>If we do go with python, it would be nice to keep the configuration > >>files as much configuration as possible. The reason I question having > >>any "full" language as a configuration language is that in practice I > >>see a lot of logic creep in to "configuration" files and then they > >>become very difficult for a consumer to parse/use as configuration. > >>While a bit of an unfair example, our buildbot-configs fall into this > >>category. > > > >A million times this. Putting our configs in Python has let to terrible, > >terrible hacks - to the point where we don't even know how to do things > >like "turn off leopard tests for some branches" anymore > >(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=773120). I strongly > >discourage using Python when you don't need a fully featured language. > >You will do bad things. You will regret it. > > There are a lot of bullets in "batteries included" languages. The > Python foot gun worries me greatly. We even have this problem in > make, and that is a much simpler language!
As I said on irc, i think the "language" for build manifests should be something between .ini and jar.mn. Because they're simple, straightforward, and are well known. And simple. I understand why people are eager to use python or lua, or other scripting languages. But the fact is you really only need scripting in very rare cases. The vast majority of our build is "take this file, put it there", "take this file, preprocess it, put it there", "compile this" or "link that". And occasionally, we need to add flags for specific files. The build manifests should make defining those extremely simple. There's also the case of conditionals. But i think the vast majority of the conditionals we use are of the type "do this only on windows", or "do this only on arm" The few remaining things can have python scripts, but let's worry about them later. Mike _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
