Re: Build systems suck. Can Lua be the basis for a better build system?

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 06:17:04PM +0000, Zé wrote:
> On 03/10/2013 09:20 AM, martinwguy wrote:
> >On your PC, with one user, what you say is true.
> >
> >On a Debian build-daemons or the GCC compile farm, for example, the
> >system headers change all the time, as developers upload new, modified
> >versions of all the libraries, some of which fix bad defines in header
> >files.
> >   In your personal case, it is rare, yes, but in a wider context this
> >would give broken builds where the system headers have been fixed, or
> >apparently successful builds when some turkey actually just broke your
> >app by fixing the system headers.
> 
> I don't think its reasonable to claim that the projects you've mentioned 
> are remotely representative of typical development projects, let alone 
> that the only cases that don't match their needs are the ones that 
> involve one user working on a single PC.  There's an entire 
> multi-billion dollar industry that fits between those two cases.

Sorry for the OT, but this scenario is actually more representative than you
might think. "System" headers are anything included by "<...>", including
third-party libraries. If you update to a newer version of Lua, or update an
XML library, then your dependencies are already out-of-date when you next
`make`, and ideally make would know this and rebuild stuff that depended on
those headers.

Whether to deal w/ it is another question. But it's more common than you'd
think even for a lone developer on Linux, not to mention all the big builds
at large companies. Just because you never worried about this before doesn't
mean it wasn't happening under your nose. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
(I learn news things all the time like this, and think to myself, man, life
sure was easier when I didn't know that.)