On 17 January 2014 09:26, Andre Fischer <awf....@gmail.com> wrote: > I would like to present some ideas about how to improve the > building of OpenOffice. Maybe this can serve as a basis for a > face-to-face discussion at FOSDEM. > Quite a nice idea, its more or less the base we use in the capstone project.
With the capstone project we try to convert the current system to a visual studio solution, which are xml. The idea being that we can easy 1) convert it to a generic xml structure 2) build a vc and makefile generator (basically just a huge style sheet) I was going to talk about it at FOSDEM, but due to some unfortunate (but logical) clashes, preferred not to. rgds jan I. > > Makefiles in general and our build environment in particular have a > declarative and an imperative part. In short dependencies are declared > and build recipes are given as instructions. This is reflected by > both our build systems. For dmake we have makefile.mk files in all > source directories. They contain basically the names of libraries to > build and c++ files to compile. The recipes that define how to link > and compile are located in solenv/inc/. This is similar for gbuild. > There are a couple of makefiles (named Makefile, Module...mk, > Library...mk and so on) in the top level module directories. They > also just declare the set of files to compile or link. The gbuild > recipes can be found in solenv/gbuild/. > > This observation together with my (our) unhappiness of the current > state of our build systems lead me to the following "insight". One > obstacle when playing around with other build tools, like cmake or > ninja or just plain GNU make makefiles (as opposed to our > meta-programming gbuild files) is the syntax of how our dependencies > are declared. It would be so much easier when they would be stored in > a file format that is both machine and human readable and not tied to > one specific program. > > What if we used XML files to represent the dependencies? We could > convert the gbuild makefiles into XML files with very similar > structure. A simple Perl script or Java program (both understand XML > and are part of our build prerequisites) can convert the XML file to > gbuild files that would be almost identical to what we have today. > And when we want to try alternatives, we can provide other converters > and make experiments. See [2] for an example. > > Such a converter could be more complex than just do a simple syntax > translation. For using ninja [1], which is described as "assembler" > and has no %.o : %c rules and no if/else/fi, we would need more than > that. But still less than cmake because our compiler (and other build > tool) detection is done by configure. > > Using XML files would probably not much of an overhead. The > translation into makefiles has to be done only when the makefile/XML > representation changes. The additional dependencies, one per current > makefile (less than 10 in the average module), are negligible compare > to the dependencies for several hundreds of source files and several > thousands of headers. > > But again, this is not (yet) a proposal for change. > Just the basis for discussion. > It is also not (yet) a non-proposal for changing the build system > completely. > Just the idea to express our "business logic" in a way that is > independent from the build system (whichever we use/will use). > > > Best regards, > Andre > > > [1] http://martine.github.io/ninja/manual.html > [2] Excerpt from sw/Library_sw.mk: > $(eval $(call gb_Library_add_linked_libs,sw,\ > avmedia \ > basegfx \ > comphelper \ > ... > vcl \ > vos3 \ > xo \ > $(gb_STDLIBS) \ > )) > > > $(eval $(call gb_Library_add_exception_objects,sw,\ > sw/source/core/SwNumberTree/SwNodeNum \ > sw/source/core/SwNumberTree/SwNumberTree \ > sw/source/core/access/acccell \ > ... > sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtsh3 \ > sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtsh4 \ > sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtundo \ > )) > > -> > > <library="sw"> > <linked-libraries> > <library-reference name="avmedia"/> > <library-reference name="basegfx"/> > <library-reference name="comphelper"/> > ... > <library-reference name="vcl"/> > <library-reference name="vos3"/> > <library-reference name="xo"/> > <library-reference variable="gb_STDLIBS"/> > </linked-libraries> > <source-files language="c++" exception_handling="yes"> > <file name="sw/source/core/SwNumberTree/SwNodeNum.cxx"/> > <file name="sw/source/core/SwNumberTree/SwNumberTree"/> > <file name="sw/source/core/access/acccell"/> > ... > <file name="sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtsh3"/> > <file name="sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtsh4"/> > <file name="sw/source/ui/wrtsh/wrtundo"/> > </source-files> > </library> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > >
