[Python-ideas] Rewriting the build system (part 2)

[Ryan Gonzalez]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
wrote:

> Ryan Gonzalez writes:
>
>  > I have used fbuild a LOT
>
> Actually, I suspect that in the relevant sense, you haven't used it a
> lot.  Have you used it for a single program on
>
> 1.  more than 3 CPUs, AND
> 2.  on each CPU, more than one (and preferably more than two) OSes, AND
> 3.  for each CPU-OS combination, more than two different configurations
>     of the program being built, AND
> 4.  for each CPU-OS-configuration combination, at least 3 versions of
>     the program source (preferably spanning a major version bump)?
>
>
No...but I know that Felix uses it for iPhone, OSX, Linux, ... with
separation of host and target and multiple configurations.


> The number of programs/versions you have built on a single (or small
> selection of) CPU-OS combinations is irrelevant to the discussion.
> The problem autotools helps to solve better than any other system I
> know of is bootstrapping on a new system.  It's also quite good at
> handling foibles (== regressions) across version bumps of the source
> program.
>
> I agree it's suboptimal (at best :-) to have a PyPI module that
> depends on the autotools.  I've found it to be a real PITA for Windows
> users who want to develop certain Emacs Lisp applications, for
> example, which is a similar kind of development environment to Python.
>
> But for bootstrapping Python itself, what else is there, really?
> Every time I've seen a project move to something like SCons, I've also
> seen their port rate to new platforms decrease dramatically.  (Hard to
> interpret that trend, though -- if a project has the free cycles to
> change build systems, maybe they have ported to almost all of the
> plausible platforms already.)  Autotools alternatives just have way
> fewer modules for dealing with new and/or old ;-) platforms.
>
>
This is also SCons. Everybody loved it until they had to maintain it. :)


> Bright! Shiny! New! system         use crufty old system :-(
>            +                  =>              +
>    missing library :-(                     library
>
> Caveat: Autotools is the only build system (well, Imake -- now you
> know how old I am!) I have substantial experience with.  But I've
> heard stories from colleagues about the limitations of Scons and
> cmake in this respect, and I find it hard to believe that there are
> systems out there with the accumulated knowledge of platforms that has
> been assembled in Autotools over the decades.
>
>
SCons is very annoying. CMake is weird and only really useful for those
huge, 20,000 file C++ projects.

-- 
Ryan
[ERROR]: Your autotools build scripts are 200 lines longer than your
program. Something’s wrong.
http://kirbyfan64.github.io/
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