JEP 138: Autoconf-Based Build System

[Erik Joelsson]

On 2012-02-22 10:57, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Has anybody thought about how these changes will affect the builds on Windows?
>
Yes, we in the build-infra team have given this a lot of thought. Since 
the windows build is among the slowest, this is where we see most 
potential for improvement.
> I know that JEP 138 mentions a multi-core Linux machine as main
> target, but I think we should not completely forget about the Windows
> build because:
The JEP was written like this to limit the scope of the first project. 
We intend to do follow on projects to improve things further.
> - as of today, the Windows build are already significantly slower than
> the current Linux build
> - the Windows build already has very "esoteric" dependencies like
> special 'make' and 'cygwin' versions which are hard to fulfill (adding
> new ones like autoconf  will probably worsen this situation)
>
One of the improvements we have done already is removing the requirement 
on the rare version of make. (The version supporting ':' in filenames). 
Our goal is to make it easier to build on windows, not harder.
> Further enhancing the *unix build is of course a nice thing but on the
> other hand that will further increase the gap to the Windows build.
> Moreover I'm afraid that the usage of autoconf will make it even
> harder than it is today to build on Windows. Currently the Windows
> build can be done with either MKS or Cygwin but using autoconf may
> limit this to Cygwin only which is not only considerably slower than
> MKS but also has sever problems on Windows 7 (see this mail thread:
> http://old.nabble.com/Is-anyone-able-to-build-on-Win-7-td33196055.html#a33199600)
>
The requirement for autoconf is only needed when changing the configure 
script. For the normal user, just running the configure script does not 
introduce new dependencies.

We are trying to move to a cygwin only environment, to standardize 
around fewer environments for better supportability. We chose cygwin 
because it's free. This is of course dependent on us getting the windows 
build to be fast enough using cygwin. We will not accept build speed 
regressions. The problems on windows 7 are also something we need to 
take into account. We have suffered from those problems too.

/Erik