On 2020/03/14 23:46:17, dak wrote: > Why would we want to move away from GNU make as a build system?
The current build system is a per directory system, which is fundamentally flawed. (See http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf). This has several implications: * we can't get enough parallelism in the doc build * there are several underspecified dependencies (eg. if you change something scripts/build/ , a build in mf/ will not pick up the change) then there are problems with stepmake * because each subdirectory has its own output directory (eg. mf/out/ ), a significant part of our build is involved with copying/symlinking files so we don't have out-www/ in our HTML links. * our build system relies heavily on GNU make magic. As a programming language, GNU Make just isn't very good. It's not expressive, and it has no typesystem. This makes it hard for people to work on the build system. * stepmake tried to be generic Make templating system (but did a bad job at it). At the same time, the genericity is causing complexity I have been experimenting with Ninja (https://ninja-build.org/), but Ninja has a very restricted model. Make functions, wildcards, etc. are not possible. In order to advance my experiments, I'm trying to clean up the build so I can port more of the build over. But even if we don't migrate to something else, cleaning up the build makes it easier to maintain. See https://github.com/hanwen/lilypond/tree/ninja if you want to try it out. Moving to something el https://codereview.appspot.com/553700043/
