[Aptitude-devel] Towards a better build system

[Miles Bader]

Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> writes:
>   Also, I'm a little less concerned about missing a few configure cases
> with SCons because *the configure tests are written in Python*, which
> means that any halfway competent programmer should be able to add their
> own tests (if nothing else, by copying-and-pasting the existing ones).

Meh.  99% of configure writing is just using canned tests, and is often
trivial.  The remaining 1% basically comes down to writing /bin/sh (the
fact that m4 is mixed in there is largely transparent in actual use).

Python, while not a great language, isn't the worst in the world -- but
I don't think its merits or lack thereof make much difference given that
actual "programming" is a an extremely small part of most build
descriptions (autoconf/automake is actually pretty good at allowing a
concise expression of the standard stuff).

Unless aptitude has an unusually complicated building process, this kind
of fussing over the build system seems like churn more than anything
else; in the end, you're likely to simply end up with a _different_ set
of complaints, and not much to show for the effort...

-Miles

-- 
The key to happiness
 is having dreams.      [from a fortune cookie]