[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Convert mesa to automake/libtool

[Keith Packard]

On Tue, 4 May 2010 08:34:00 -0400, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> wrote:

> a standard non-recursive makefile structure, as is used
> in, say, Keith Packard's notmuch[1] project.

That's Carl Worth's notmuch project, and it was his idea to build using
make alone. I'd have to say that while it makes the build system easier
to understand and works fairly well on Linux, I'm not sold on the idea
yet as it doesn't make things like dependencies work reliably and that's
one area where Mesa currently suffers more than any project I know. I
believe his stuff also works only with gnumake.

> Not sure what to say about this. It seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to
> implement a robust tarball rule, but maybe I'm missing something.

As much as I hate defending autotools, it's areas like this that make it
a useful system -- someone else is dealing with creating all of the
underlying rules that make things like this 'just work' - 'make
distcheck' creates the tarball and then verifies that it actually works
as advertised.

> Yeah, you still need makedepend, but I don't really view this as a
> problem.

Anything where you're depending on Mesa developers to ensure that the
build system has correct dependencies will fail often enough to make
people stop trusting them and routinely run 'make clean' or equivalent
before every build. That's what I do today, fortunately ccache helps
enough that I don't scream in pain (nor do I build mesa fifty times a
day).

> This is true. For the rest of us who run like children whenever autotools is in
> the room, it would be unfortunate.

Yeah, I'm no autotools fan, but the option of building a custom
replacement just doesn't excite me.

Btw, in case you haven't heard, autotools also encourages people to make
a non-recursive build system, so these aren't mutually exclusive, just
that we don't see it used very often (and, no, I don't know why).

> Documentation can be written for any build system, although in my experience, a
> non-recursive build system is quite straightforward and the fact that it's pure
> make means that pretty much anyone can grok it.

Do you really want to write a build system? Is that how you envision
spending your time as a Mesa developer?

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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