Re: would it be time to replace scons with meson build system?

[Ladislav Michl]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 03:29:32PM -0800, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> Yo Ladislav!
> 
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 00:19:52 +0100
> Ladislav Michl <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 05:55:15PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > Bernd Zeimetz <address@hidden>:  
> > > > Imho the only useful alternative is cmake. Or meson, if you
> > > > really think so.  
> > > 
> > > Both two-phase systems.  Why do people keep building these things?
> > > It's a bad idea that never gets better noo matter how often it's
> > > repeated.  
> > 
> > First phase is discovering build environment. So unless you found a
> > way how to do this very quickly, people will keep building those
> > two-phase systems, just to save time spent waiting for recompile.
> 
> scons is very quick to determine the build environment, and then caches
> it for later use.  The entire scons time is a tiny fraction of the rest
> of the buld, test and install times.

In the other words, to make it aware of environment change (library
installed), you need to tell it to dump that cache, right?
So instead of reconfiguring only after change, scons determines each
time it was already configured, merely informs user about doing so
which forms more than a half of its terminal output after single file
change.

We clearly do have very different ideas about what 'a tiny fraction'
is.

> So "
> discovering build environment." is no reason for two phase"..

Ouch...

        ladis