While I do not advocate the use of ocamlbuild, we could draw some inspiration from the design.
Essentially, an ocamlbuild-based build system is based around a library of rules (implemented in OCaml, we could do the same in Python, of course), and any number of trivial description files. OCamlBuild itself contains a solver that finds one possible solution to build the target by applying the rules to the description files and source files. For instance, to extract documentation from some source code: - create a file foo.odocl, containing the list of all files that should be passed to the documentation generator; - ocamlbuild's standard rule library knows how to produce %.html from %.odocl; - it is pretty easy to add a rule to produce %.pdf from %.odocl. Generally, this design is rather good at separating tasks that need a full language (implemented as rules) from tasks that only need a trivial description (implemented as description files). Cheers, David On 8/23/12 8:19 AM, Mike Hommey wrote: > As I said on irc, i think the "language" for build manifests should be > something between .ini and jar.mn. Because they're simple, > straightforward, and are well known. And simple. > > I understand why people are eager to use python or lua, or other > scripting languages. But the fact is you really only need scripting in > very rare cases. The vast majority of our build is "take this file, put > it there", "take this file, preprocess it, put it there", "compile this" > or "link that". And occasionally, we need to add flags for specific files. > The build manifests should make defining those extremely simple. > > There's also the case of conditionals. But i think the vast majority of > the conditionals we use are of the type "do this only on windows", or > "do this only on arm" > > The few remaining things can have python scripts, but let's worry about > them later. > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > -- David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD Performance Team, Mozilla
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
