[Samba] waf workaround?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2012-07-12 at 20:50 -0700, Linda W wrote:
> Is it possible to build samba without waf?
> 
> It has slowed down my local samba builds by a factor of 5-10x -- it 
> seems to lack
> any parallelism, and on a 12 core machine, that really sucks.

Waf builds are quite parallel, just call make -j.  Using this is a
standard part of our regular builds on our 24 way autobuild server.

> When going through it's tests, it's noticeably slower than the configure 
> shell
> tests that do the same...
> 
> But then the build/make parts all go by like molasses...
> 
> What is wrong with standard make tools that proprietary - going back a 
> generation
> or two, stuff had to be used?

Waf is free software: https://code.google.com/p/waf/

> What did it solve that wasn't solvable in a standard make?

It solved and solves many problems. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Waf
has some details.  In short, we tried a perl and Makefile based system
for Samba4, and the issues that created lead us to seeking a new build
system. 

See also BUILD_SYSTEMS.txt
https://gitweb.samba.org/?p=samba.git;a=blob;f=BUILD_SYSTEMS.txt;h=2aff56d81aa27c92c76bbba65632c3eef481e7b8;hb=HEAD

> Maybe waf can be configured to create a standard makefile to handle
> the more complex configuration parts, and then let make do what it does
> best?

There is much more to our build system then just Makefile-like
construction.  

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org