Samuel Jacob's Weblog

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Better build system

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I was using “make”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_build_system) to build and clean my projects. The makefiles grew bigger enough to not maintainable state. Recently I came to know about waf(http://code.google.com/p/waf/) from a forum, so decided to give a try. I went through the waf documentation and it took 2 hours to understand how it works and it took 2 days to convert all my makefiles to waf wscripts and wscript_build files.

The basic problem with make was I have write rules to how to build object files from source and

then to clean I have to write how to delete the object files. With waf the problem is simplified, you have to tell what all source files and it will take care of how to compile and link. It will also take care of how to clean the project and the dependency between files are also taken care, so no need for gcc –M and dependency files etc. The feature I liked in waf is it has colored output with progress bar 🙂

The other problem solved in Ace project compilation was build configuration. Waf will configure the project for the first time, so it solved the different cross compiler required for Ace OS.

Waf(http://code.google.com/p/waf/) is really good alternative/replacement for make tools.

Written by samueldotj

March 17th, 2009 at 3:54 am

Posted in Uncategorized