[Bf-committers] Removing Build Systems

[Nathan Letwory]

2009/4/14 Brecht Van Lommel <brechtvanlommel at gmail.com>:
> 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.

I still maintain SCons, the Blender 2.5 branch has some very good
improvements already (which I don't want to backport to trunk, because
I tried and it is just ugly work that will be phased out soon anyway).
I'd certainly have some days of mourning if we decide to drop also
SCons support, but if there really is a working solution, then I'm
fine. I've tried CMake, but I find it still somewhat lacking in
supporting everything we have - if someone manages to fix it and
maintains it well, too, then I guess I have no further good arguments
for keeping SCons (other than the amount of invested time and
continuing work I do locally, waiting to be committed one day).

There are three things that are important for me:
* ease of use, meaning out of the box compiling
* cross-platform - working on all our major platforms
* flexibility (what you get with python for scripting galore)

Of course, 1 is rather objective, but in the past months I tried using
both the Make and CMake solutions, but only the CMake came close
enough for the ease of use (which in turn maybe due to the fact I
haven't used it really much). CMake and SCons both are good for
cross-platform (Make is not) and from what I can see only SCons offers
the flexibility that I'd like to have). The lacking part of SCons
naturally is its speed as compared to Make when looking at rebuilds,
but further I think it is a valid and working solution.

In the end, I'm happy if any decision we make ensures the development
potential in every sense now and in the future.

/Nathan