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

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 04:50:25PM +1100, James Peach wrote:
> 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).
Yeah, I have seen this in a couple of places as well. I believe it's
what the Linux kernel uses. The dependency on GNU make is somewhat
problematic however, as it doesn't appear to be available on a lot of
systems (anything non-GNU, even the BSDs).

> 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.
The problem with CMake (as with gmake) is that it's an extra dependency, one 
which doesn't appear to be installed widely. I'm not sure if including
it would be a solution, as it would mean we would have to bootstrap
our build system...

Cheers,

Jelmer

-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
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