Updating waf to 1.6

[Simo Sorce]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011 06:16:05 +0100
Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:

> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > It's possible that it could be shown to be a copylib:
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries#Copylibs
> 
> That whole CONCEPT of a "copylib" is broken and it's sad that we're
> making exceptions for those.

A build system is *not* a library, so reasoning in those terms is
completely wrong.
A build system is not a a shared library, and it is not code that runs
on the built system.

So the rules and exceptions for libraries have nothing to do with build
systems.

> > But waf does make periodic releases so that might not be the right
> > exception.  If you could draw parallels between the autotools and
> > waf, that might be a way to look at it.
> 
> Actually, the right parallel to draw here is to finally start
> requiring autotools-using projects to run a full autoreconf -i -f in
> %prep.

I would require you to stop making stupid requirements to please so
bogus sense of aesthetic you think you have.
You may want to have guidelines to help new developers with their
projects, but those are nothing more than guidelines. Unless there are
solid reasons why a build system/convention or another is good/bad,
please stay away from dictating your preferences to upstream.

Avoid sharing libraries have very good reasons in the realm of
tracking security issues, better code sharing and smaller system image,
so some stronger guidelines on libraries are acceptable.

What are your solid reasons for build systems ?
It's a honest question, there may very well be good solid reasons,
although even if there are then we will have to proceed in determine
how hard it is to comply.
Even developers in general are not build experts and just *use* the
build systems, asking packagers to patch the build system is crazy for
anything but trivial projects.

> Generated shell scripts are NOT source code, we should require the
> stuff to be built from its true source code just as we do for Java
> JARs, target binaries in cross-compilation tools etc.

I have projects that have the Makefile as the shell script, and that's
it, no generation of anything. Are you going to force the packager to
build a Makefile.am and patch it in ? Good Luck with that.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York