On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 12:43 AM, Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > David Cournapeau wrote: >> >> Having a full >> fledged language for complex builds is nice, I think most familiar >> with complex makefiles would agree with this. > > Yes, people will still need general computation in their > build process from time to time whether the build tool > they're using supports it or not.
I'm maintaining the CMake-based buildsystem for KDE4 since 3 years now in my sparetime, millions lines of code, multiple code generators, all major operating systems. My experience is that people don't need general computation in their build process. CMake supports now more general purpose programming features than it did 2 years ago, e.g. it has now functions with local variables, it can do simple math, regexps and other things. If we get to the point where this is not enough, it usually means a real program which does real work is required. In this case it's actually a good thing to have this as a separate tool, and not mixed into the buildsystem. Having a not very powerful, but therefor domain specific language for the buildsystem is really a feature :-) (even if it sounds wrong in the first moment). >From what I saw when I was building Python I didn't actually see too complicated things. In KDE4 we are not only building and installing programs, but we are also installing and shipping a development platform. This includes CMake files which contain functionality which helps in developing KDE software, i.e. variables and a bunch of KDE-specific macros. They are documented here: http://api.kde.org/cmake/modules.html#module_FindKDE4Internal (this is generated automatically from the cmake file we ship). I guess something similar could be useful for Python, maybe this is what distutils actually do ? I.e. they help with developing python-standard-conformant software ? This could be solved easily if python would install a cmake file which provides the necessary utility functions/macros. Alex _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
