Well for the record auto tools does all of that because there’s near
On Mar 27, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
> I became convinced that build was an inherently arbitrary-code
> process, and not something to be universally handled by a declarative
> system, when I observed an autotools project under configuration. The
> things spend ten minutes writing and compiling snippets of C code to
> determine which features are and are not supported by the runtime.
> This is *very* arbitrary code and probably one of the tamer things
> people like to do during builds.
>
> As usual I blame distutils, because the separation is not there. So
> when you blame setup.py for having to run procedural code to generate
> the *metadata* you might go to far and think you should also eliminate
> a procedural build - simply because build and metadata are not
> adequately separate in the distutils design. Declarative build systems
> are a nice idea but they are not going to work for everyone.
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zero ability to introspect the compiler to figure out what it supports
except by compiling little programs that depend on X feature and
then running them to see if they work or not.
That being said, yes building code is inherently a process that needs
to execute things and cannot be made completely static. I believe
the metadata itself can be static, and instead of an arbitrary build
script we can declare a build hook, but that’s an argument for a PEP!
I do believe a declarative build system can work for the 90% case
though and should probably be the “default” option.