On Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 4:19 PM, Jim Jagielski <j...@jagunet.com> wrote:
> Playing devils advocate, does it make sense to introduce > Yet Another Build System at this stage? > > I anticipated this question. Firstly, we don't only have dmake and gbuild as our build systems. We also use Ant, meta-build tools like build.pl and co, Microsoft's nmake for main/icu on Windows, and probably more. The existing number of tools doesn't negatively affect development, so why should 1 more? Secondly SCons can replace ./configure, so in all all-SCons world we would eliminate 3 tools, not just 2. As for "sense . .. at this stage", we've hit several walls with gbuild at this stage: * It can't version libraries in the form of reg3.dll vs reg.so linking to reg.so.3 on *nix. Most of gbuild was written with the assumption libraries on *nix always end with .so. Even when we dangerously weaken those assumptions, and badly hack it, it doesn't deliver the link... * It already broke certain mixtures of build settings, eg. I think you can't both debug build and use precompiled headers on Windows, CFLAGS gets lost somewhere... * Nobody knows gbuild. The syntax is atrocious. It uses obscure features of GNU make. We can't debug it. It takes days of work to investigate/fix any problem with it, work that could be better spent on a this vast project with few development resources. > Also, there are a few projects that I know of that > use SCons. In general, one of the most popular common > threads related to them are "Why the hell are you using SCons?" :) > > I'd like to see those discussions. SCons as opposed to what? Damjan