On WAF

[Andrew Bartlett]

I've started to use waf for my day to day work, and I have to say that
it really has made a huge difference to me.

I had started to rebuild Samba from scratch, just in case, after any git
rebase, and after any function parameter change, using something like:

./autogen.sh ; ./config.abartlet && make idl_full clean all; make all;
make all test

I've started on a task today that requires me to change some widely used
functions in the auth code in Samba.  In the past, I would have done a
'make clean', and then hoped to spot the errors as they cropped up.

Knowing and trusting that waf understands the dependencies allows me to
just run 'make' (which runs waf) from inside my editor, and it quickly
compiles only the files that really have changed.  This makes my
re-factoring effort faster, more efficient, and more accurate -
particularly if I make a 'compatible' change, that may only have raised
a warning. 

I also look forward to the end to 'random segfault party' we would risk
on users and developers every time we made a structure change, if they
were foolish enough not to run 'make clean'.

Thanks to everybody who has worked so hard on this effort, it really has
been worth it!

Andrew Bartlett

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

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