[Bf-committers] Removing Build Systems

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> I do realize the Make system is hard to maintain. It seems the 
> requirements for building Blender with new rna & python tricks became 
> more and more complex, which is why you lost so much time on adding 
> support in Make probably?

That's what prompted my e-mail, but to me it does not seem like an 
isolated case.

> On the other hand, it's the system I like best simply because it works 
> so well. My productivity and coding work depends a lot on a pleasant 
> well configured and fast make system. Scons could not replace it on 
> that level for me, and although I wouldn't mind giving Cmake a try, 
> it's a valid statement to require it to work just as good, right?

Yes, any replacement should work just as well.

> I also don't fully grasp the proposal; is it about bringing 4 systems 
> back 2? Or is it because 'make' is too complex to maintain? If it's the 
> first, then obviously we should stick to make, it's the system in use 
> by one of the most active committers in 2.5... ;)

It's about making it easier to do changes and improve things. The 
Makefiles build system in particular I found difficult to make changes 
to. There's more things that will need to be changed and I don't look 
forward to working out those changes 3x.

I can of course just update the build system I use and let someone 
else fix the others, which I guess is the main argument that is being 
used against removing build systems, if someone wants to maintain 
their own build system they should be able to. I don't mind personally 
but do you then agree I can just do these changes and leave Makefiles 
broken after my commits?

Beyond that I do think in general there is a significant amount of 
time being wasted because we have this many build systems, but if 
people want to invest time to keep their build system working I don't 
want to stop them. It's just that in practice it seems to me that it 
does not completely work this way and during development I still need 
to deal with the other build systems anyway for various reasons.

Brecht.