Re: Switching to Waf instead of SCons?

[John Mandereau]

Le samedi 12 septembre 2009 à 02:54 +0100, Graham Percival a écrit :
> 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.

You should say *we* here... I think they weren't enough developers and
contributors around to complete all.


> 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.

bin/gub fails even more than it used to on my system: with recent
changes, "make -f lilypond.make bootstrap" even fails after having built
only Git, because bin/gub is called without argument!!!  I don't know
how to debug dependecies resolution in the PYthon code, so I won't look
at GUB within a while, at least not before I have completed major
Lily-related tasks (the Texinfo parser and switching to Waf).


>   We should get regular releases soon -- but the
> translation infrastructure is still broken for the website.

It is generally completely broken, and it's true that starting adding
the new web site while the docs directory structure rearrangement wasn't
stabilized enough made this mess more problematic.


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

If by "function" you mean "be able to build the docs and web site
starting with a clean build tree", then it's doable.  If you expect to
make current build system behave like what a big project like LilyPond
with a so large documentation deserves in 2009, it will be horribly
painful and unmaintainable.


> - 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,

To make this work, you should have different rules for generating
HTML/PDF/Info depending on whether ISOLANG variable is set, or which is
equivalent different variables used to write these rules; for clarirty
of the makefiles I prefer to keep current setup, i.e. almost duplicating
texinfo stepmake template contents into make/doc-i18n-root template.


> 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.

I've spent too much time on the old build system and failed to make it
more maintainable (did I ever really attempted achieving this anyway?),
and just reading about task generators in Waf makes me think we can do
much better with much less maintenance effort.  I won't spend more
overall time on the old build system than half an hour to answer your
questions on it.  I know it means that the web site delivery will be
delayed, but I think having doc build by waf for one or two release
candidates before 2.14 is a resonable goal.

Best,
John

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