[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 10:21 -0700, Matthieu Patou wrote:

> As I pointed on IRC, we should reduce the number of groups so that 
> linking can kick up while some stuff are still compiling (if possible) 
> and potentially not do the symbol checks if we have specified --targets= 
> on the command line so that we don't force to rebuild every thing that 
> depends on this change.

The duplicate symbol checker is run on make test, not on make for this
reason. 

The --symbol-check option is not enabled by default, nor is it turned on
by --enable-developer. 

The ABI checker can be disabled by configuring with --abi-check-disable,
and as I understand the code only runs on libraries that have been
changed or re-linked.  That said, I do agree that waf tends to prefer to
re-link over being sure that it doesn't need to. 

> This should make the speed of waf build --targets=smbtorture much faster 
> when you change something in talloc.c or whatsoever.

One of the key reasons to make this change is so that if we can find
ways to make waf both totally reliable and a bit faster for developers,
that we have those resources, rather than also spending those on
maintaining a parallel build system.  

It is however really important that our build systems are totally
reliable.  It is no benefit being a bit faster building if we loose that
time again debugging an 'impossible' Samba crash, that doesn't reproduce
anywhere but the customer's production environment, because they patched
Samba and didn't rebuild from 'git clean -x -f -d' or a fresh tarball
checkout.  

The fact that waf always builds correctly, without special rules is a
key feature that *saves* developer time in the long run, by ensuring
that our users (who overall, build samba even more than we do) always
get a correct build. 

Andrew Bartlett

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