On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 05:13, Sascha Schumann wrote: > Automake is clearly not a choice, nor has it ever been for a > project of considerable size. And recursive make clearly > sucks -- the PHP project got rid of it 2 years ago. We agree > on these points.
+1 > > It was also written in Python because it is *just* starting. That script > > will also product .dsp and .dsw files in the future (the Subversion > > project generates these files, so I intend to follow that model). For now, > > it is just starting: it got rid of the recursive make crap. But there is a > > lot more that it can do. > > However I completely disagree that Python (or Perl or PHP) is > a good choice for use in build systems. As part of the configure process, I would agree with you, but as part of buildconf, I disagree--not everyone needs to run buildconf--only developers, and if you're a developer, it's *really* not asking that much to have Python on your dev box. > > So no... switching to a shell script would not be beneficial, as it would > > cut off future capabilities. > > I doubt that. .dsp and .dsw files are just other text files > which can easily be created using sh, grep, sed, tr etc. Ick. Ick ick ick ick ick. "Easily" is obviously a subjective term. Who wants to write (and, more importantly, *maintain*) hundreds (or thousands) of lines of /bin/sh code? Not to mention the fact that Python can be much more compact than /bin/sh after you hit a certain level of complexity. Anyway, I suppose that agreeing to disagree may be for the best here. Subversion has required python to run autogen.sh for years now, and it's been great for us. -Fitz
