[Bf-committers] New Developer Meeting minutes

[Nathan Letwory]

2010/1/12 Erwin Coumans <erwin.coumans at gmail.com>:
> I'm surprised of so much resistance among the Blender developers
> to such a nice build system as cmake.
>
> Thanks,
> Erwin

We can also reverse the question - we have a very nice and working
SCons system. Why would you want to get rid of the nice system I
created?

"I'm surprised at the resistance among certain people to such a nice
build system as SCons"

Obviously I'm biased as our SCons build system creator and maintainer
as it currently stands, but it works on all our supported platforms.
Builds without too much fuss for new and old developers. And for me as
release builder on Windows it does all I need it to do without having
to use any extra steps. I run scons and voilà, new release stuff
ready.

I won't mind seeing SCons go IF there is a system that does all what
SCons currently does (if it does more, yay). Currently that is not the
situation, and *I* am *not* going to invest time in Yet Another Build
system, until someone else has done exactly that. I have so much time
invested in the system, and I believe that our SCons system is more
than adequate for our developers that I don't see the need to start
looking into other systems. Waf I've checked somewhat, but heck, the
first rewrite of SCons into what it currently is already took almost
half a year (instead of the 3 days I originally estimated), and since
then it has had many improvements (and yes, it can do with more
improvements, but that we can say of everything we have).

At times, when I look at this thread and related discussion in IRC,
(glorifying CMake and downtalking SCons), I can become a little angry.
There's a lot talk for CMake, wondering why people are against it, but
then the people who start the talks don't do anything about it. I
think that doing that is not beneficial for us and just needlessly
generates noise on our mailing list. Consider this message part of
that stupid noise. If you want to see changes: contribute the damn
changes, don't just talk and leave and come back to wonder why nothing
has changed. (And do make sure your patch with the great new build
system does what our SCons system does now).

I will look into having SCons create VS project files (XCode I know
nothing of, so that'll have to wait) - there's support available for
that in SCons, but there are some fixes needed for it to be useful in
our case.

In any case, lets just make sure Blender gets better, ok? I continue
with my Scons efforts until someone comes with a better system in all
aspects.

/Nathan