Most of you are aware that our autotools setup has reached a point
of unmaintainability at which Ivanovic and I believe we need to
change our build system to something (anything!) else. Additionally,
we'd like to be able to use the same build recipe for all platforms.
Ivanovic and I are claiming this decision because (a) as our
release manager he is the single person most affected as a user by
autotools problems, and (b) with isaac seldom around I'm the person who
has been most called on to modify our build setup.
Some weeks ago we effectively narrowed the alternatives to scons and
cmake. I am championing scons, Ivanovic cmake. But I think either of
us is willing to yield on this; we've more or less agreed that we will
make the final decision by comparing the readability and
maintainability of the scons and cmake recipes (what in American slang
we call a "bake-off"). In that comparison all active devs will be
invited to taste the baked goods and express their judgments, and I am
confident that Ivanovic will listen with the same attentiveness and
good judgment that I intend to apply.
As a first step towards all this goodness, I have been working hard on
an scons recipe to replace all our autotools cruft. Unfortunately I
have about reached the limit of what I can do alone, and must now ask
for help.
The basic problem here isn't that I can't make scons do what we want;
scons is not very complicated. It's that analyzing the behavior of
autotools is painful. So much so that you basically have to have a
pretty good a-priori grasp of what it's intended to do before you can
read it. I have done that for the main build, but there are some
outlying areas where I don't know enough about what is supposed to be
going on.
Even if we go with cmake, the scons recipe working is critical-path
for the following reasons:
1. For the scons vs. cmake bake-off to happen, the scons recipe has to work.
2. scons is like earth orbit. We may not want to stay there, but most
of the work of getting to anywhere *else* in build-system space is getting
out of the fierce gravity well of autotools. And that is the real
problem we are facing now.
Our current state is this:
* The scons recipe can build the game and edtor and all tools
* The scons recipe can correctly install everything but the data
directory.
* The scons recipe can correctly uninstall everything.
Here are the "outlying areas". Basically, at this point I need to
hand these off to domain experts who have a better hope than I of
understanding what autotools is intending.
1. Building the unit-test binaries.
This one is grzywacz's I think. There's some stuff with setting
#defines I don't understand, also how to get the link line to work.
I suspect it would be easier for grzywacz to learn basic scons
and just do this one than to try to explain it.
2. Documentation formatting
I don't know who owns this one. I'd be willing to do it if the other
missing stuff gets covered.
3. Data-directory installation.
I thought I understood this, then I looked more closely and it turns
out that (a), I don't, and (b) looking at the autotools machinery for
it makes my head hurt. This one is Ivanovic's, except that
Shadow_Master has hinted that he understands it and thus might be
qualified to do it if he is foolish enough to volunteer :-).
The minimum I need here is a detailed directory-by-directory spec of
what is supposed to get copied where. But it would be better if
whoever takes this one actually does it, so as to develop some
scons skill and not leave me as the project's only expert.
4. Distribution making.
I think this one lands squarely on Ivanovic, maker of tarballs :-) I
have tried to make it easy by creating scons variables that list all
the shippable *.[ch]pp files.
At minimum, I need a spec of what else goes in a tarball and where.
But it would be better if Ivanovic learned enough basic scons to
modify the recipe himself, because he is likely to need that skill later.
5. Translations handling.
The headache I get from trying to unravel data-directory installation
is nothing compared to this, from which I run screaming and of which
I want no part. We need to have a detailed spec for how this is
done just as self-protection, but I would strongly prefer to never
even look at it. Ivanovic's again, though Torangan might be helpful.
6. Server installation
This one is relatively minor. Mainly what I need to kow here is
where we expect the server binary to actually get installed and
if there are any installation steps other than copying it there
and setting ownership and suid/guid bits.
Please, if you have expertise in any of these, step up. The
very least we need to do is document all this stuff for future
maintenance purposes.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons.
If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.
-- Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the LA Times 15 Oct 1992
_______________________________________________
Wesnoth-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
