Samba 4 build system (was: Re: Samba3 build farm can't execute smbtorture4 anymore)

[James Peach]

On 24/12/2007, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:
[snip]
> So, the only viable alternative I see to the current build system would
> be to go back to something basic - like a autoconf-generated Makefile
> from Makefile.in, perhaps distributed across a set of smaller Makefiles
> included with "include". It has its flaws, but also certainly its
> advantages: it's simple, it's something everybody in the team is
> familiar with and it has proven to work relatively well. We can always
> reinvent the wheel later...

In the past I worked on a build system which was constructed purely
out of a top level makefile which included a ries of makefile snippets
from around the source tree. Each software component has a
self-contained makefile which pulled in a set of generic build rules.
This kind of system is quite nice and simple to work on and can be
made reasonanly high level with the right build rules. The drawback is
that you have to require a particular make implementation (GNU Make is
the only real candidate).

The other interesting candidate that's cropped up recently is CMake.
Apparantly, it's the build system for KDE which is encouraging, but I
don't have any direct experience with it.

-- 
James Peach | jorgar at gmail.com