Hi Mathias, you wrote: > This doesn't rule out CMake as a serious competitor, but it shows that > its main benefit (being able to build with VS on Windows) comes at a price. > and
> Lately I gained some experience with dependencies in OOo and reducing > them. IMHO it's easier to understand how the different parts of OOo work > together the more the complexity of the dependencies is reduced. This > helps new developers to understand. And even the more experienced > developers benefit from the better maintainability. > > So I think that aiming for leaner dependencies (not only) in the long > run is a worthwile goal and I wouldn't consider any change in the build > system that wouldn't go for it. Whether it's the number one or the > number two priority doesn't matter for me: IMHO it's a must have > priority. > I find those arguments a bit contrived - the first one is a truism, and the second one seems to mix tight implementation dependencies with well-defined, sometimes posix-standardized, black-boxed external tool dependencies. This is nothing to spend two seconds' thoughts on, for all the platforms out there with a decent package and dependency management system, simply because you trade an automagically-resolved dependency for reuse of existing functionality - something I value quite high in a project where developer resources are amongst the scarcest. The story on win32 (and other, not-so-standard platforms I believe you alluded to) is totally different, of course, but you won't fix that by prohibiting sed & awk - fixing the root cause here means performing cross-compilation for those platforms. (you need to build/debug natively on those platforms? sure, but binning e.g. cygwin from the impressive list of ~14 build prerequisites http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Development/OpenOffice.org_Building_Guide/Building_on_Windows#software_requirements means getting rid of the _least problematic_ one - trivial to install, easy to update, free, built-in package management etc. - shouldn't we rather eliminate the real deal-breakers there first?) So again, the build system dependencies for me are one of the least important criteria, and when it comes to python, we have that dependency *anyway*, on *any* developer machine, due to mercurial. Just my 2c. :) -- Thorsten
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