On 8/12/2013 11:13 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I'm hanging a general comment here for a lack of a better place.
We're far from being enamored to make and we have no vested interest in keeping
it. At the same time its place in the dmd foodchain is relatively modest (i.e.
it's not a big hindrance to most developers) and replacing it with even the
perfect tool is unlikely to make our lives significantly better. Worse, there
seems to be no obvious replacement for make - each seems to comes with its own
issues as you exemplify above for SCons - which further undermines motivation.
Yes, there is duplication across posix.mak and winxx.mak. Inside winxx.mak there
is yet another level of annoying duplication. But we don't work on those files
frequently enough for all that to be a large problem. That being said, yes, I
wish that all got improved. But the margins involved are small enough to make it
difficult for the solution to become worse than the problem.
Exactly. There's a matter of proportion. We don't need to use a cannon (and all
the support a cannon needs) to kill a cockroach.
For example: building in a Python dependency just so a user can compile dmd?
This is seriously out of place, besides a giant WTF telling anyone who wants to
install dmd on Windows that he has to go find Python and install that, too?