Discussion: Hadrian's defaults

Spiwack, Arnaud arnaud.spiwack at tweag.io
Tue Mar 19 08:42:03 UTC 2019


On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 4:52 PM Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:

> Newcomers to autoconf-based ecosystems often add a rule to run configure
> to their Makefiles, as a "shortcut". At some time thereafter, they discover
> that there's a problem when configure alters the build plan make is
> executing. There's no sane way to integrate this properly if the build plan
> changes enough, even if configure is always the very first thing executed
> as part of the original build plan. This generally results in forcing make
> to abort after running autoconf, since trying to be more clever results in
> looping over configure. The only other way that works is arranging for
> 2-stage Makefiles where the outer one amounts to "configure && make -f
> Makefile.real". Which makes it noticeably more error-prone to tweak
> something and do a fast rebuild, since configure will often cause it to be
> a full rebuild instead. If you try to give configure dependencies so that
> it doesn't get re-run, you discover that it's dependent in some sense on
> its own outputs and again can cause loops.
>
> Trying to integrate configure with hadrian runs the same risk, heightened
> by hadrian not using anything like Makefiles, so it would be even easier
> for it to either miss changes made by configure or end up looping on it. Or
> worse, the same with autoconf — or for ghc, the boot script which runs
> autoconf, among other things, and thus has even nastier risks in terms of
> missing important changes made thereby or causing loops.
>

 Aha! But is Hadrian doesn't use Make. And the shortcoming of Make which
make autoconf necessary as a separate tools are ones that Shake fix. Making
it a breeze to integrate a configure script without hassle.

I'll be honest, so far, so far, the thread doesn't have much convincing
arguments in favour of keeping `-c`. The argument which I understand is
Ben's in [ https://github.com/snowleopard/hadrian/issues/457 ], who saw the
arguments he passed to ./configure overwritten by Hadrian. This is
surprising and unnecessary.

But you have to realise what you are advocating for: the most typical
workflow (not passing special arguments to ./configure) is the one which is
special cased. We should rather take this as a challenge: how do we fix the
limitations of `-c` so that it can be made the default; rather than giving
up. A possibility would be to record the arguments passed to the configure
script in a file, and make Hadrian pass these arguments to `./configure`.
For instance.

I'd also like to impart a bit of urgency to this: we are breaking
everybody's habit now, so now is the time to discuss changes. When we're
used to the new build system and it isn't new anymore, it will become much
harder to justify change.

By the way, on the default flavour: in addition to Ocaml's Dune, it appears
that Bazel (Google's newish multi-language build system) also has the
developers' build be the default. It's not enough data to establish that
this default is the consensus. But I'm quite warming up to the position
myself.

Best,
Arnaud
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