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by colinsane 1091 days ago
from the perspective of someone who spends 100x more time trying to compile other people’s software than writing my own build scripts, they don’t really feel that different. CMake seems to offer more features/builtins, but without doing much to actually tame complexity. which isn’t necessarily a good thing because then the people who think it’s a good idea to shove complexity into their build system just do more of that and i have to read 10x more build scripts to coerce the thing into doing what i want (e.g. getting it to cross compile).
1 comments
avidphantasm 1091 days ago
Yeah, at some point I feel like certain things have an irreducible amount of complexity that ends up getting moved around like an air bubble stuck under plastic laminate. Sometimes moving the complexity helms, sometimes it feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. CMake seems to be a net positive, but it’s not without substantial pain at time.
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colinsane 1090 days ago
that’s a really fun metaphor — and it does capture a lot of my day to day experience. but a lot of these bubbles can also be split apart or joined, and doing that skillfully has pretty huge social implications in open source.

i’ve been toying around recently with [sxmo]. at the top level, it’s a collection of shell scripts. when any script would become too complex, it’s factored out into some library-like abstraction and lifted into a different repo, language, etc.

i’m coming at this from phosh, after i hit a bug in it, opened the code base to debug it, and realized “i have no clue where to even start”. desktops already split the bubbles of complexity into components like compositors, window managers, service managers. sxmo shows that you can be even more extreme in this: any time a single bubble of complexity grows too large, break it up into smaller bubbles. do this rigorously and it means any time the software doesn’t behave as i want, i can pretty confidently plot a path to fixing/improving it (and know how long it’ll take and therefore if it’s worth the time).

there’s complexity inherent in anything, but there’s a lot of different ways you can arrange it. my experience with CMake is that the complexity sort of just pervades the whole stack, rather than being isolated into manageable bubbles at all.

sxmo: https://sxmo.org/

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