Re: premake (was Re: autoconf / automake)

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Josh Simmons <simmons.44@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm not really a fan of having a build system build config files for
> another build system. Seems somewhat redundant.

There are some good reasons for it, though.

It avoids a depency on a possibly rare build-system in favor of a
dependency on much-more-likely-to-be-installed tools (make etc) for
"end users" (those who download your package and just want to
compile/install it).

Moreover, this additional "generation" step adds flexibility -- you
can generate different "config files" for different target systems.
E.g. for a linux/unix/posix distribution, you generate makefiles and
shell scripts; for windows you generate vcproj files, etc.  This extra
step could make things much simpler.

Given there are a bazillion and a half build-systems around
(seriously: is there anybody out there who _hasn't_ written a build
system at some point...?  I've never even heard of Waf), these are
real issues.

> 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.

Even just Python's a pretty huge/complicated dependency...

Really, there's no way around it, you need to depend on _something_,
the question is what it is, and how painful it is for your intended users.

-miles

-- 
80% of success is just showing up.  --Woody Allen