PROPOSAL: Use Cmake as the build system for Samba

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 17:38 -0500, simo wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 08:54 +1100, tridge at samba.org wrote:
> >  > Last I checked scons (a couple of years ago now), it was quite a nice
> >  > system (I much prefer it over CMake) but horribly slow for something
> >  > like Samba. I worked on a fork of Samba that used scons back then and
> >  > gave up on it halfway through because of this.
> > 
> > That was one of the reasons I suggested waf. It is a fork of SCons
> > that is (among other things) much faster. See:
> > 
> >   http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/bench.txt
> I'd just like to make sure we remember where this discussion started.
> 
> The problem with the current system is that we waste too much time on it
> and nobody knows it well. The reason is that it is custom built and of
> course we play with it only when something doesn't work.
> 
> This does not work, we don't do build systems, and we shouldn't waste
> our time building a build system, we have better work to do.
> 
> This is the main reason why CMake was proposed. It is something we just
> use. If it turns out there are some bugs we can certainly occasionally
> dive in, but once we find a workaround/a fix, we should be done and not
> think about it anymore. It's not our problem, it's the CMake people
> problem. And we can rely on it being their problem because CMake is used
> in very many projects so it is unlikely upstream will go away during the
> night.
> 
> I am not so sure about this waf, which nobody here knows for real.
> I have no idea how good it is or if it can do what it claims, I notice
> that it is derived from sCons and that people have migrated away from
> sCons to CMake, so this doesn't sound too good to me. Although maybe waf
> has solved all the problems sCons had. I don't know, and I don't have
> immediate access to a waf expert to find out.
> 

> Also. It doesn't have a big community so it is a risk to go that route.
What are you basing that on? waf and scons both have a fair number of
contributors, some relatively large projects that use it and active
mailing lists. Nothing to indicate they're going to go away anytime
soon.

> Finally we do not have anyone with experience on waf, so I am not sure
> who could do the job of porting the current build system over there.
I don't think the fact that we happen to have one person around who is
familiar with CMake right now and nobody who is (yet) familiar with one
of the other build systems is a good reason to go with CMake blindly.

But what I don't like, is exactly the idea that we copy it in and 
> forget. To me it looks like simply exchanging one problem for another.
> I fear we would start forking it and turning very soon back into the
> nightmare of having to maintain a build system ourselves. Again.
There's no need at all to copy it in; I think all that was suggested was
shipping a copy with Samba for convenience, like with do with e.g.
libpopt.

Cheers,

Jelmer
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