Re: premake (was Re: autoconf / automake)

[Josh Simmons <simmons.44@...>]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> Dimiter 'malkia' Stanev <malkia@gmail.com> writes:
>> Has anyone considered using premake?
>>
>> It's written in "C" but extended through lua.
>>
>> http://industriousone.com/premake
>
> Ugh, I've had the misfortune of encountering this with some Lua
> package (IUP? I forget) -- it was not a pleasant experience.
>
> As in ... "hmm, comes with makefiles, oops they don't even start to
> work, maybe I need to regenerate them... hmmm, no obvious way of
> specifying parameters ...oh, i need to write lua code... <45 min of
> random grovelling, and no success; eventually give up trying to build
> the package>"
>
> [and note this was merely an attempt to _build_ the package as
> distributed (I didn't modify anything), on a fairly common OS
> (Debian).]
>
> Maybe this was the package-writers fault and not premakes, but
> although I love the idea of a Lua-based build-system, my experience
> with premake didn't make it look like a very good implementation of
> one....
>
> Whatever gripes people have about autotools, configure scripts tend to
> work out of the box on linux systems without much user input.  Other
> systems like cmake/scons/jam/whatever have their own pluses and
> minuses, but they also at least have the advantage (like autotools)
> that they're popular, so tend to have the most obvious problems worked
> out, and are reasonably well maintained.
>
> -Miles
>
> --
> Opportunity, n. A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.
>
>

I'm not really a fan of having a build system build config files for
another build system. Seems somewhat redundant.

I'm a fan of Waf, despite it using Python instead of the premier Lua.
It's easy to distribute with your project too, so you have a
self-contained build script that relies only on python.