status of the s4 waf build - go to stage 3?

[Stefan (metze) Metzmacher]

Hi Tridge,

> Most developers building s4 now seem to have switched to the waf
> build and everyone seems to be pretty happy with it.
>
> At this stage it may make sense to go to "stage 3" for use of waf in
> Samba4 (as per the original proposal). That would mean:

We still have a few missing features, we need to fix.

  1) that the waf build would be the recommendedbuild
> 
>  2) that autogen.sh be renamed to autogen-autotools.sh and autogen.sh
>  would setup the waf build
> 
>  3) that developers changing anything that affects Samba4 would be
>  responsible for updating the wscript files if needed, instead of the
>  config.mk files
> 
> There is a problem however. The merged build is not done yet, so if we
> switch Samba4 to use waf, the merged build may bitrot. 
> 
> Right now I'm in two minds over this. The old system for Samba4 is
> already bitrotting, and stopping the rot is very hard. It is failing
> at least two tests on all platforms, and I think (but haven't yet
> proved) that this may be caused by the "doubly instantiated global
> variable" problem that is pretty deeply ingrained in the old build
> system. If that is in fact the cause of the failures then it will be
> very hard to fix, and I think it would be a waste of effort if we plan
> on dropping the old Samba4 build system in the near future.
> 
> At the same time, I don't want to lose the merged build. Once the waf
> s3 build is done I'd like to see the merged build use waf (assuming
> we reach agreement on that, which isn't at all clear!). 
> 
> I'm also thinking about the next alpha of Samba4. Even if the two test
> cases that are broken with the old build are not caused by the doubly
> instantiated globals problem, we do know that doubly instantiated
> variables do cause many very subtle bugs. I'd like those bugs to be
> gone in the next Samba4 alpha, so I'd like the next alpha to use the
> waf build. 
> 
> I think the only real solution is to modify the "stages" plan a
> little. The original plan was that when we shifted to stage 3 that the
> old build system in Samba4 would be only maintained by those
> enthusiastic enough to maintain it. I didn't imagine that I'd be one
> of those people :-)
> 
> I now think we should consider moving to stage 3 for Samba4/waf, but
> we also commit to keeping the old build at least building until the
> time when we are ready to switch the merged build over. We can do this
> via the build farm, keeping both the old and new build systems in the
> build farm, and then fixing build failures with the old build system
> as they come up.

Yes, we should maintain both for a while.

metze

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