On Thursday, 30 May 2013 at 07:50:11 UTC, Timothee Cour wrote:
We should move to a D-based build system to build
dmd/druntime/phobos/d-programming-language/tools.
Reasons, in case it's not obvious:
1) DRY: makefile is full of repetitions
2) cross platform: different makefiles for different
architectures are
needed (even win32 vs win64!)
3) safety: makefile happily ignores that $VAR variables are not
set, and
can create havoc; likewise tools/update.sh is a bash script and
may not
stop on 1st error.
4) tools/update.sh doesn't work out of the box on OSX last i
checked (I
made a pull request for that some time back:
https://github.com/timotheecour/d-programming-language.org/commit/557a2befa74ddfe99ee5c0e12e7c3d028f27d276)
Even a bad D-based build system will be better than a makefile,
but it's
not hard to write a reasonable one at least for the particular
task of
building dmd/druntime/phobos/d-programming-language/tools.
It'll lower the
entry point for people to contribute to dmd/phobos by making
rebuilding
trivial.
Here's how it'd work:
1) a mixed D-based/makefile build that'll work 'from scratch'
via
bootstrapping:
1a) dmd: first uses a makefile to build dmd+druntime
1b) rdmd built from a D file using dmd
1c) phobos, d-programming-language, tools built from a D file
using rdmd
2) a pure D-based build that'll work using an existing dmd
binary (eg
distributed binary)
that's the one most will use.
You may want take a look at Qbs, it will the next build system of
Qt in replacement of QMake.
http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qbs-Quick-Reference
Using a full featured language is good cause, there is no
restriction and build aren't just build, it's also
packaging/testing issues.
Doing something that just have to call compiler binaries is
finaly the simple thing, and provide more control to users.
