[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Michael Adam]

On 2013-05-21 at 21:10 +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-05-21 at 12:51 +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> > On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 12:28:53PM +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > > IIRC
> > > 
> > > ./buildtools/bin/waf build --targets=smbtorture
> > > 
> > > should rebuild just smbtorture.
> > 
> > Ah, another one: When coding larger changes, in autoconf I
> > like the ability to just compile one .o file. For example, I
> > frequently do a "make smbd/open.o" for example if I mess
> > with that. So far I have not found a way to do that in waf
> > quickly. Any hint for that?
> 
> You could determine the command waf is using (make V=1 should do it),
> and manually invoke gcc yourself.
> 
> It's not pretty, but it should allow you to handle this unusual case. 

Well, it is not so very unusual for a developer working on a
certain set of code files to want to quickly check whether the
changes compile.

If I remember this correctly, the main difficulty in providing
something like this for the waf build lies in the fact that our
object files are generated as basename_<number>.o when the
source file is basename.c, and number is generated by waf.

So let me record a couple of wishes that target at reducing the
turnaround times for builds in a development process:

- Can we create targets for specific objects, to just
  compile a single C file?

- When building a certain binary target, can we change
  waf's mode to only compile the needed code files?
  (linking is already reduced, as Volker confirmed)

- Is there a way to reduce the startup time waf needs
  befor it (apparently) does anything?

It would be great if the poeple most knowledgeable about waf
could comment on the above. These are really things that make
development with autoconf faster. Let's not forget that on the
other side we have much advanced dependency tracking in waf that
greatly reduces the need to do make clean or git clean.

Cheers - Michael

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