Choosing a new build system for Samba

[Matthieu Patou]

Hello Tridge,
> Hi Andrew,
>
>   >  Clearly there is a very real waf proposal.  Tridge has it on a build
>   >  farm host already
>   >  http://build.samba.org/?tree=samba_4_0_waf&compiler=cc&function=Recent
>   >  +Builds and has it passing almost all of 'make test'.  The wiki page is
>   >  at http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Waf
>
> A minor update - it is passing 'make test' on some boxes now. I put it
> on the build farm as samba_4_0_waf a few hours ago, and of course
> found plenty of problems. I'll look at those over the next few days.
>
>   >  If we maintain the existing system, who will maintain it?
>   >  ---------------------------------------------------------
>   >  Should we maintain any new build system in parallel, or will we have a
>   >  'flag day' that we switch on?
>   >
>
> I'm in favour of a staged transition. I would imagine the stages would
> be:
>
>    stage 1) get it working reasonably in a separate branch. For the waf
>             effort this is my waf-wip branch, and I suspect it will
>             reach this stage for s4 in the next week or so.
>
>    stage 2) when it looks good and the team agrees, then merge it to
>             master, but ensuring it changes zero files that impact on
>             the existing build system (the waf-wip branch now does
>             this). At this stage maintainence of the new build system
>             in master would be the responsibility of those who have the
>             enthusiasm to do it. The old build system would still be
>             the one we recommend to users, and Samba developers who are
>             not interested in the new build system would have no
>             obligation to update the new build scripts for any changes.
>
>    stage 3) once the proponents of the new build system think it is
>             sufficiently good, then they would propose changing the
>             default build system to the new one. We'd discuss this
>             within the team and the wider community and decide if we
>             would go ahead. If it is decided to change the default then
>             the maintainence obligation of developers would switch to
>             the new build scripts. The old build scripts would be
>             maintained by whoever volunteers to maintain them.
>
>    stage 4) if we get to the stage that nobody is willing to maintain
>             the old build scripts any more then we could remove them
>             from the tree.
>
> I don't know how long each of these stages might take. I'd guess that
> the waf effort will get to the end of stage 1 for Samba4 in the next
> week or so, but I won't really know till it's done, as I may still run
> across a problem that is hard to fix. I'd certainly like it to reach
> that stage before SambaXP.
>
>    
Although I have nothing against you are giving your point of view with 
waf as the new build (well it seems).
Do you think this can apply to the cmake proposal as well ? Is there any 
conditions ?

Matthieu.