[fpc-devel] The future of fpmake

[Darius Blaszyk]

On Mar 30, 2011, at 9:29 PM, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>>>>>> - managing debug/release builds (also cross-compiling)
>>>>> 
>>>>> What is failing in the current system for this ?
>>>> 
>>>> I was thinking to be able to do something like :
>>>> 
>>>>> fpmake build debug
>>>> 
>>>> This will add some debug options to the build process. Also it should be possible to create a custom build profile.
>>> 
>>> And how would you do this ?
>>> 
>>> I don't want to complicate fpmake unnecessarily.
>> 
>> Improve the command line paring algorithm. It should check if there is something behind the build command line option. If so then it is a named build profile. In fpmake you could check the TDefaults.Profile property to determine which options to add.
> 
> I would prefer a named option, i.e.
> 
> fpmake build --profile=debug
from the users perspective this is not very friendly. 

> and I think TDefaults.Profile needs to be a) A collection.
> b) Loadable from some config file, I suppose ?
> --profile then just selects one item in the collection.
So you mean have a fpmake.pp and next to that a fpmake.cfg? That does not make sense. The fpmake.pp in itself is a config file (well sort of). I would just prefer to keep it simple, maybe have the user register the profiles in fpmake.pp?

> Other than that, I think this is OK.
> 
>> 
>>> 
>>>>>> - cmake like system (display and store information on builds and test suites, etc)
>>>>> 
>>>>> fppkg should handle that part of the job, not fpmake.
>>>> To make fppkg work for my own project I need to add a fppkg.cfg to my project right?
>>> 
>>> There is no such thing as 'fppkg for a project', so I'm not sure what you mean here.
>> But I am talking about using fpmake for projects other than FPC. So the cdash (not cmake as I mistakenly wrote in the mail) idea should also work for standalone projects.
> 
> In that case, I don't understand what you mean.
> 
> fpmake's intended use is to compile your FPC code. I can see the use of trying to run a testsuite, build docs and a binary zip for distribution: they are all FPC related things.
> 
> But it is not intended as a general build system (i.e. replace make or ant or rpm or deb).
What do you mean with "general". Fpmake is a build system right? So why not use it also for other projects? Ok, perhaps the cdash functionality belongs in a different tool (although it could be in fpmake), but let's not limit fpmake only to FPC please. Let us (end users) also play with it ;)

Darius