On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote: > > But I'm afraid I really don't want to switch away from just using (GNU) > make for the actual compilation. > > I don't know anything about scons, but if you can use it to write a > python script that just does the configuration step, (outputting a > Makefile.config say), then that might be very interesting. Well, to me, part of the appeal of SCons is that it doesn't generate Makefiles. This article is a little old, but the first three sections are a pretty good rundown on the limitations of Make. http://www.scons.org/wiki/FromMakeToScons If you really want a tool that generates Makefiles, take a look at CMake. Unfortunately, I think CMake tries to do too much with the Makefiles and they become close to unreadable. In the attempt I made to come up with CMake build files, CMake generates at least 3800 lines of Makefiles (from a starting point of 30 lines of build files). > Some people > have recently told me that python would be a much more sane language for > doing configuration in than shell. Well, Python is a much more sane language for doing just about anything as far as I'm concerned. :) > I don't know if they're right or not, but I'm (somewhat) willing to have > multiple implementations of the configure script (since there's always > the option to just skip it and configure Makefile.config manually). But > I'm definitely not willing to have multiple build systems. I think that having multiple different configuration systems would be pretty awful, especially if people make changes to their favourite configuration system and hope that someone else fixes the others. > Meanwhile, the only advantage I know for automake is that once it's > setup, adding a new file to compile is as simple as adding one file to a > list in the Makefile.am. We've already got notmuch as easy as that with > just adding a file to a list in Makefile.local. Once SCons is set up, adding a new file is just a matter of adding the name of the file to a list as well. CMake is the same, and I'm sure that other systems are similar. > So I'd very much like to continue exploring what we can do with our own > configuration system, (in whatever language/language(s) make sense). It would seem to me that we would be re-inventing a lot of the work already done by other people. > Thanks for listening, Same here. -- Jeff Ollie