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Re: Oh no...
by Guillaume Laurent on Wednesday 14/Sep/2005, @07:16
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OK, you're right, I'll try to calm down.
> You say the programmer should concentrate on programming. I say that to learn programming you need to learn the language, the api, the system, the architecture and so on.
I agree with that, but the build system is not, or should not, be part of this. Would you use a compiler which required extensive reading just to understand how to compile a single C file ? Unless you had no choice, you'd probably prefer it to be as simple as "cc foo.c", right ? It's the same for the building system, or the text editor, the IDE, the version control system, the documentation generation system, etc... I make a clear distinction between development tools and development platform (for instance, C++/QT/KDE, or Java, or C#/.NET). Learning a platform is mandatory of course, even though it should also be as simple as possible. But your IDE, compiler, and build system should never ever get in the way, and should not require you to dive into tons of tutorials and stuff just to get simple things done. And in that regard, the autotools fail utterly, while scons is rather successful.
> Now imagine everyone would have at least half of the autotools skills of Coolo and by now no one would complain about it.
And everyone would spend time on autotools rather than on their code. Again, time is the critical issue.
> I probably asked you a couple of times now to name at least a few 'advantages' of Scons over autotools
I did in my last post. To sum up, it's just much simpler to maintain and use, simply not having this 2-level generation of files is a huge win. Also having all in one script (configuration and building) helps immensely. It also handles conditional compiling very easily. Just try it for yourself, you'll see.
Note that I'm not a huge fan of scons, I prefer Ruby over Python, but the only ruby-based build system (rake) is even more exotic than scons is, and doesn't handle configuration tests. But scons is still much better than autotools. |
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