proposal: merge waf build of s4 to master

[Volker Lendecke]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 08:44:21AM +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> What could a new build system do, to make this easier for you?
> 
> For example, if waf built Samba so that when you install OpenLDAP and
> Kerberos, you can do so in a location that none of the rest of the
> system will see (say /usr/local/samba/lib/openldap and you don't modify
> ld.so.conf or LD_LIBRARY_PATH), but Samba links against with -rpath,
> would that make your emergency installs less risky?

For me LD_LIBRARY_PATH has worked fine so far.

> Presumably you already have prepared a set of known-working tarballs
> that you bring onto these sites.  Would just having a script in the
> Samba that knows how to build python for waf be enough, or is there a
> particular advantage to combining it?

In this thread I have tried to find out the real advantage
that the end-user of Samba has from waf. Tridge has named a
few, most of which are also possible in a autoconf based
system. The colored progress bar might be a challenge, but
I'd call that dispensable.

To be honest, so far I have not been convinced to throw away
the old system in favor of something that will bring its own
set of problems. The current system might be verbose and
clumsy to use, but it is understandable. For example the GNU
ld detection problem with SLES 11 that I recently fixed was
pretty simple to do. I am sure that you will reply this
particular one is just no issue at all with waf, but when
some similar problem appears with waf, I know that I will be
very pissed when I have to wade through hundreds of lines of
python code to find the place where it fails. You might say
that we have good contact to the waf author, but what
happens when he is on vacation for a month? The autoconf
based system has tons of independent documentation and the
resulting configure is a pure shell script without much
magic. To me this is an advantage that is very hard to beat
when you want to fix things.

Volker
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