[Bf-committers] Removing Build Systems

[GSR]

Hi,
brecht at blender.org (2009-04-12 at 1647.42 +0200):
> We currently have 4 build systems being maintained: Makefiles, SCons, 
> CMake and MSVC. Making changes for 2.5 development and doing merges 
> for all 4 has gotten quite tedious and I've lost days fiddling with 
> all these build systems. Further it seems that compilation breaks 
> often because of lacking build system updates, which again takes time 
> working with people in #blendercoders to get things building again.

Interesting issue about getting things done.

Instead going mad with changes, just document in commit log what is
needed and let others do it. It will break the build in some systems
for a couple of days (we do not have autobuilders so...), but OTOH it
should allow proper and efficient response once someone has time to
look at the issue. Guessing what has changed is another waste of time,
just like is trying to fiddle with all them, just different persons
wasting time.

And the other day I joked about GIT, but a more distributed work mode
(git, hg, whatever... I am not talking about one but the concept)
could help with time waster things. Or not, as it would mean learning
another system and everybody administrating "own copy". SVN is still
used below what it can do, anyway.

There are plenty of tools and options, but they have to be used and
hops reduced so more people can contribute more effectively (original
CMake implementor vanished, hint or coincidence?).

But back to just build systems:

[...]
> SCons I think we should keep because it is well maintained and easy to 
> use. CMake can generate native project files and is much faster than 
> SCons on older systems. So we can keep both of these I suppose, though 
> one would be ideal.

CMake still needs to be in the same level of the others. Last time I
checked it had issues with add-on libs like FFMPEG. Which for me seems
to be the other biggest issue, we are not maintaining 4 systems for
Blender, we are maintaining four and hacking build systems in a
handful libs; and even shipping precompiled versions too, without
checking at build time (see issues in last weeks about lib/). So that
makes three extras compared to most other projects (that do not have
many systems, add systems for libs or build libs).

For now, I will just keep on digging around Makefiles, they seem to be
a bit alive yet. If anybody needs help with those, just contact me.

GSR