Re: OpenOffice.org will migrate to GNU make

[Björn Michaelsen]

Hi Stephan,

Am Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:01:11 +0100
schrieb Stephan Beal <address@hidden>:

> Wow! And all this time i thought Make was going out of style! (Not
> that i'd stray from it, but i tend to be in the minority of my peers
> when it comes to preferred toolchains.)

Well, we are specifically using GNU make and its $(eval ) and $(call )
functions extensively, using GNU make to actually write a GObject-like
object-oriented syntax. There is a new blog post on how this looks like:

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/gbuild_how_to_migrate_a

> > Comments welcome!
> i can't express how surprised i am by this, given the size and scope
> of OpenOffice. That will certainly provide some interesting technical
> challenges, and should prove to be an interesting use case for GNU
> Make.
> 
> Good luck! :)

Thank you. We are rather confident about it. We already have more than a
fourth of OpenOffice.org's C++ part in it (counting by #include
statements and by LOC according to wc). Some numbers:
- 1967 c/c++ files are compiled by the system (total in OpenOffice.org:
  ~15000 including some "external projects" that use their own build
  system, for comparison: Firefox 3.6.12 ~6000)
- 15430 targets are handled by the system (grepping for "File has been
  updated." in the make -p output.) These are mostly header files as
  dependencies.
Once you have build that, it takes GNU make 5.3 seconds when re-run to
make sure all files are up to date. 5.0 seconds of that are parsing the
dependency files (a whopping 84MB). Running make in callgrind shows
make spends 30% of the total time in the function find_char_unqoute in
this case.

The build system is currently supported on at least Linux, Linux
64-Bit, Solaris Intel, Solaris Sparc, Windows(*), OSX -- likely with
more to follow.

Best Regards,

Bjoern

(*) Windows is slow as usual: the noop build takes ~10 seconds there.