On 03-04-2012 04:35, Andrew Wiley wrote:
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 9:04 PM, Alex Rønne Petersen<xtzgzo...@gmail.com>  wrote:
On 03-04-2012 01:19, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:

On 03/04/12 00:48, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:

The Waf meta build system has good support for both GDC and LDC.


I'm reluctant to use Waf due to the issues described here ... :-(
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00714.html


Which ones in particular? Debian lacking a system-level Waf doesn't seem
like a huge issue to me.


Unless you want someone else to build your software.

Include the Waf binary with your software. It's designed to be small so that you can do this.

My biggest frustration with open source software and specifically with
meta build systems is that I don't want to learn a scripting language
or a scripting language's package manager just to build and use a
piece of software in a completely unrelated language, and if there's
no pre-packaged version of a build system, I'm not going to take the
time to figure out how to use whatever package manager language X uses
to install that build system and all dependencies. Most likely the
dependencies and build system will wind up in my home directory, which
is hackish at best, and it'll all sit there forever and clutter up my
home directory because I'll never touch that package manager again.
For a build that will be set up exactly once and modified extremely
rarely after the first month or so, how is this an improvement over
this Makefile that can already do perfect incremental builds:

TARGET  := someexecutable
SRCS    := $(shell find -type f -name '*.d')
OBJS    := ${SRCS:.d=.o}
DEPS    := ${SRCS:.d=.dep}
XDEPS   := $(wildcard ${DEPS})
DC      := gdc

DFLAGS = -Wall -Werror -g -O2
LDFLAGS =
LIBS    = -lpthread

.PHONY: all clean distclean
all:: ${TARGET}

ifneq (${XDEPS},)
include ${XDEPS}
endif

${TARGET}: ${OBJS}
     ${DC} ${LDFLAGS} ${DFLAGS} -o $@ $^ ${LIBS}

${OBJS}: %.o: %.d %.dep
     ${DC} ${DFLAGS} -o $@ -c $<

${DEPS}: %.dep: %.d
     ${DC} ${DFLAGS} -fsyntax-only -fmake-mdeps=$@ $<
     sed -i 's:$(notdir ${<:.d=.o}):${<:.d=.o}:g' $@

clean::
     -rm -f ${OBJS} ${DEPS} ${TARGET}

distclean:: clean

I understand your frustration about having to learn another language. Learning a language is always an expensive task. But people don't necessarily know Make syntax, just as they don't necessarily know Python, or whatever (and I might add that Make can get very frustrating - the requirement to use hard tabs is extremely annoying and unintuitive).

A problem with systems like Make is that it is hard to keep Makefiles portable. It doesn't take much to accidentally introduce some sort of platform/shell/compiler dependency. Python, as a programming language, at least helps abstract most of these things away (for instance, shell syntax).

Anyway, as for what 'language' to use, it all comes down to your personal situation. If you know Python, using something like Waf is completely inexpensive, just as using Make is inexpensive if you know the Make syntax.

--
- Alex

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