Re: Switching to Waf instead of SCons?

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:10:13PM +0200, John Mandereau wrote:
> Le mardi 08 septembre 2009 à 19:53 +0100, Graham Percival a écrit :
> > I absolutely do not want to have a half-completed switch to waf 
> > for documentation.
> [snip]
> > But I don't want to end up fumbling around in waf
> > because no active developers are familiar with it.
> 
> Is this complaint an attempt at discouraging us from switching to
> another build system?

It's a recognition that I royally screwed up over the summer in
attempting too many big things at once.  The new website, the doc
rearrangment, and learning GUB.  As a result, I failed to complete
*any* of them during the summer.

I now have a core2 quad with 4 gigs at my desk.  Unfortunately the
building is locked over the weekend, but on Monday I can seriously
tackle GUB.  We should get regular releases soon -- but the
translation infrastructure is still broken for the website.

>  Our current build system for the documentation
> sucks so much that even a half-finished set of Waf tools and wscripts
> will provide better building conditions.

Yes, but OTOH how much work is involved in making the current
build system function?

- some files need to be added to EXTRA_DIST (or whatever the
  equivalent is).  I can do this.
- the translations need to use WEB_TEXI2HTML_INIT and
  WEB_TEXI2HTML_SPLIT for general.  I've now spent an hour trying
  to do this to no avail... I've added "texinfo" to the
STEPMAKE_TEMPLATES, I've added 

$(outdir)/general/index.html: TEXI2HTML_INIT = $(WEB_TEXI2HTML_INIT)
$(outdir)/general/index.html: TEXI2HTML_SPLIT = $(WEB_TEXI2HTML_SPLIT)

and I've spent a lot of time trying to see any other difference
between Documentation/GNUmakefile and Documentation/fr/GNUmakefile.


I don't care about doc-clean, but I *would* like to have a
sensible set of created docs, and I *would* like to allow the
translators to start working on the new website as soon as the
content is finished.  If this could be done by the two of us
spending another 5 hours each on the old build system, I think
it's worth it.

Cheers,
- Graham