Re: build system work

[Phil Holmes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Graham Percival" <address@hidden>
To: "Carl Sorensen" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Lily devel" <address@hidden>
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2011 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: build system work


> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 11:38:19AM -0700, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> > On 3/4/11 11:09 AM, "Colin Campbell" <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > On 11-03-04 10:54 AM, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> > >> On 3/4/11 10:31 AM, "Colin Campbell"<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > >>
>
> [subject: wiki or not?]
>
> > >>> I'm the noob here, so I'll defer to greater wisdom.
>
> Ok, for the record: we're still gathering opinions about wiki vs.
> CG.  The most important opinions come from the people offering to
> actually do the work, of course.  So far, that means Colin and
> Phil.

Personally, as I said, I'd prefer a Wiki, but the one we used for regtest 
cleaning doesn't appear to want to accept edits from me, and it won't send 
me an email, so I'll go with the consensus of documenting what we learn 
about the build process in the CG "build-notes".  I've got my scripts 
working so that I can just check the output of that rather than doing a full 
docs build.

> > >> The main difficulty I see with Graham's original proposed workflow is 
> > >> that
> > >> not everybody has git push access, so we need somebody who will 
> > >> volunteer to
> > >> push patches from those without access.
>
> I was going to dump them all on James.  It'll be a good learning
> experience for him, and as long as all patches only touch the file
> Documentation/contributor/build-notes.itexi , nobody else needs to
> care if anything goes wrong.  (as long as the docs can still
> compile, at least).

I think I'd like James to chime in and agree to this proposal!

> > The proposal was to start by documenting what the build system
> > does.  And he estimated that the documentation process would
> > take 50 hours of development time.
>
> Yes.
>
> > But I don't think that project needs any visibility on frogs --
> > it's way over the head of frogs.  Anybody who is contributing to
> > build system revision is clearly a developer, IMO.
>
> Yes and no.  The only two volunteers so far clearly *are* Frogs.

Ribbet.

> My other big qualm is the amount of work I'll be putting in, and
> the resulting inefficiencies.  For better or worse, I think that I
> know more about the doc+web build process than anybody else.  I
> would not be surprised if I could describe (+ learn if necessary)
> the build process 10 times faster than Colin and/or Phil.  I'm not
> trying to brag here about me being fast at learning -- it's not
> that at all!  This is simply because I spent most of Fall 2009
> spending 40+ hours a week working on lilypond, most of which was
> on the build process.  I've already spent dozens of hours puzzling
> through bits and pieces of the build system.

I'm sure that's true.  I'm currently reading the GNU make manual!


--
Phil Holmes