Re: [PATCH] serious doubts about waf

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:02:37PM +0100, John Mandereau wrote:
> Le mardi 24 novembre 2009 à 21:20 +0000, Graham Percival a écrit :
> > On the 16th, I gave up and fixed this one myself.  However, I
> > discovered that I couldn't copy files from srcdir into the blddir
> > without changing their name, which kind-of borks
> > Documentation/pictures/.
> 
> I'm quite certain we can avoid copying pictures from outdir to blddir;
> however, if more generally we can't transform a file in srcdir to a file
> in blddir that has the same name,

This is a current limitation of waf.  The author stated that
fixing it was on his TODO list, but that was over a year ago.

We can either do weird stuff to avoid this limitation, ask him to
fix this bug, or try to fix it ourselves.  I personally favor the
latter two options; I'm sick of doing wierd stuff just to fit
within the limitations of a build system.

> It's not for making the pictures available to Texinfo
> formatters, as a simple -I srcdir (which we already have in current
> build system IIRC) would do the job.  For some pictures, we resize them,
> but then for clarity we could give a different name to the source.

I suppose so.

> For other pictures, IIRC we just symlink them so that they're
> caught by mirrortree (a module used by www_post.py that links
> files into *-root).

I don't want to have mirrortree in the new build system if we can
avoid it.

> Is it worth going on investigating this?  I think so, so I'll
> have a look.

Waf will not be used for 2.14.  If there are truly no translation
issues that need addressing, then go ahead, but it'll be a few
weeks or months before we'll try any switching.  Oh, for that
matter, we should probably re-sync dev/waf with master (to get the
recent manual renamings), copy the wscript* files from
dev/gperciva, then delete dev/gperciva.

I'm not in any kind of rush to touch any of this until after 2.14,
though.

Cheers,
- Graham