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