Subject: Build system
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Sat Jun 17 2000 - 06:36:52 CDT
I have been working all night trying to get deps to work. I HATE MAKE!!!
I'd like to thank Justin for staying up with me and helping me, but I
still haven't got deps to work and I'm not very much closer.
On http://www.abisource.com/~abi/dear_abi.phtml, Abi says he's (she's?)
pretty sure that AbiWord will transition to autoconf eventually. Are we
ready for this transiton? I am sick of messing with makefiles, and as much
as I hate autoconf I would be willing to put in some effort to get the
build system over.
It's not like there isn't a pressing need to make the switch. Every time I
change a header file I have to run make clean and wait 15 minutes for it
to rebuild all of the files that don't need to be rebuilt. That's 15
minutes that I spend when I could be fixing bugs in AbiWord, working on
new features, and making it a better program. Instead I spend it waiting
for my computer to finish a complete rebuild. I'm sure the other
developers share my frustration.
I'm sorry for being so whiney, but it's hard to be joyful after wrestling
with make for hours. Not to say that autoconf is much better, but I think
it would require some moderate work on the part of the build system team
(myself, and justin if he's interested) and after the initial work of
switching to it would save a lot of time and frustration for all
developers.
Thanks,
Aaron Lehmann
P.S. Or, if SourceGear wants to sponsor me with a faster computer that
doesn't take so long to rebuild AbiWord, I'd shut my mouth about the build
system insanity ;-).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Jun 17 2000 - 06:36:57 CDT