Re: Moving away from make

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 08:33:45AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> I don't do Python or many newfangled languages.  I have worked with Make
> for over 20 years.  The casual contributor will be one used to the
> technology and thinking underlying Lilypond.  More likely than not
> someone with more than a trace of free software project experience in
> them.

You are incorrect on this point.

In early summer, I tried to start an effort to figure out how the
build system worked.  The main volunteers were Phil and Colin: two
people with zero previous free software project experience.  And
both working on windows, actually!

Public record of this effort:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2011-03/msg00059.html

You can see the results so far in git.  Undoubtedly you will laugh
at how primitive and possibly incorrect these descriptions are,
but this what we've managed to do in six months:

  gitk Documentation/contributor/build-notes.itexi


Yes, various expert FLOSS members (such as Reinhold, Carl, and
IIRC yourself) have stepped forward to fix a few things in the
builds -- but the only people who are "working" on the build
system "full time" are windows users.
(that said, Phil recently bought a fast computer so that he can
make builds faster and thus experiment more easily)


Don't tell me that experienced hackers will take care of the build
system.  They aren't.

- Graham