[Geany-devel] Dropping Waf support?

[Matthew Brush]

On 12-07-16 10:36 AM, Enrico Tröger wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> this topic has been brought up already a couple of times, for example on
> [1].
>
> What do you think about dropping Waf support in Geany and in the
> Geany-Plugins project?
>
> While I was defending Waf in Geany, I somewhat changed my mind. Not
> because I don't like it anymore, but I increasingly see the efforts in
> maintaining two (to be exactly three for Geany) build systems is too
> much. Since the make/MSYS build system support seems to get better and
> better due to Nick's and Dimitar's work on it, I thought about dropping
> the Waf support. It seems nobody knows it well enough and probably
> except for a few users nobody is using it.
> (And obviously I don't do so much anymore and also lost a bit interest
> in maintaining forever.)
>
> The other thing is that Waf causes often problems for distro packages,
> especially for the Debian folks [2].
>
> So, I'd go the easy way in this case and just remove Waf. Then we only
> need to maintain the autotools based build system for non-Windows
> systems and the make based for Windows.
>
> For Geany-Plugins, we would need to get something working on Windows but
> maybe we could re-use Geany's make based system for Windows here.
>
>
> What do you guys think?
>

Sounds fine to me as long as it doesn't mess up your great Windows builds.

In a perfect world we could also eventually drop (or not rely on) the 
Windows Make files too since it seems like with a proper Mingw/MSYS 
setup the Autotools stuff is supposed work I think. I know the last time 
I tried it didn't work, but it's probably not something that can't be fixed.

So +1 to getting rid of Waf, also not because it's bad, just because 
it's extra work for little benefit (to me at least).

Cheers,
Matthew Brush