Re: [tup] Make vs tup when speed is not an issue

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Layus

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Dec 20, 2019, 3:47:09 PM12/20/19
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I asked myself the same question during the process of porting Firefox's build to Tup.

The bottom line seems that of course, you can get a perfectly correct build system with make, *if* you are willing to think about all the corer cases yourself.
Tup alleviates much of the mental load, and relieves yourself from working around each of make limitations.

Of course, using .d files can work around dependency detection, but you need to wire that in make, making it more complex, and any mistake in the way you implement it leads to potential incorrect builds.
Of course, you can take special care to filter environment variables, and force make to rebuild when they change (well, I have no idea how, but writing their content to a file that is a dependency to all the targets may be a start).
Of course, you can force make to rebuild when the makefile itself changed, but again you have to clutter your makefiles to do that, and get an half-backed solution.
Why would you do that by hand (and maintain that by hand) when you can get it baked-in in your tool.
Just have a look at the kind of makefiles that cmake generates. They handle most of the above, and are clearly unmaintainable manually.

That would be my not too theoretical argument.

Oh, and tup comes with a monitor, that tracks changes and rebuilds immediately :-).

Also, all of the above work-arounds have shortcomings that I find extremely important to consider, but are less convincing to random end-users.
1/ GNU -MD does not handle missing files. This means that adding a new header earlier in the includes search path will not be detected. Tup does that. (and can do that for system headers if asked to).
2/ Depending on Makefiles themselves is a common trick, but it is coarse grained, as all the targets in a Makefile would need to be rebuilt whenever one changes (This is more about speed, that you specifically asked not to consider).
3/ Make will not tell you when you have hidden (a.k.a. undeclared) dependencies. So you may achieve a correct build definition with Make, but you will never be certain you do. Why live with uncertainty when it can be ruled out ?

Now, Tup comes with some constraints due to all the correctness enforcement. These would be valid reasons not to use it if you build is so peculiar that it its them.


Time to stop, but I have tons of arguments in stock :-).

-- Layus.

On 20/12/19 01:07, Gerardo Delgadillo wrote:
I'm porting Eclipse C++ project builds (ugly) to something more reliable. My C++ projects consist of many-many libraries and executable files. So, as a test, I ported a few to to TUP, and it works great. However, a co-worker asked, "Why not just use make instead? It's in all the servers and works great." My reply was: "Auto-dependency detection and speed." Now, speed is very nice but it isn't much of an issue in our case. Then, he said that given the right inputs (.cpp, .h, .d files. etc.), make can deal with dependencies if used along with GNU -MD flag to generate the 'd' files, etc.

What's your take on this never-ending debate? (I.e. I couldn't convince him of tup's superiority).
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Gerardo Delgadillo

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Dec 20, 2019, 3:53:15 PM12/20/19
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Porting Firefox's build to tup! That sounds like lots and lots of libraries and files, etc. Wow! I'm impressed. At my company, we "only" have 130 Eclipse projects to port. Other projects I'm not considering because they aren't Eclipse projects, use make, ninja, and gradle. Joy, right?

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Layus

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Dec 20, 2019, 4:02:17 PM12/20/19
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Well, I did a rough implementation in parallel with the one done by Mozilla.
If you are a bit adventurous, the Tup backend developed at Mozilla is available in mozilla-central (mozilla's officila repo) and is working quite well.
See the doc here https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/build/buildsystem/tup.html (not sure how fresh it is, I am not much related to Mozilla's implementation)

Their setup is a bit unusual however, because they use Tup as a backend to their custom, python, build system front-end.

If this is of any interest to you, may I shamelessly recommend my short paper on the subject ? It is available on CEUR here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2510/sattose2019_paper_2.pdf

-- Layus.

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Gerardo Delgadillo

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Dec 20, 2019, 4:07:46 PM12/20/19
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Nice. We did something similar but with Chromium. Your paper is super interesting. Thanks for sharing it!

Layus

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Dec 20, 2019, 4:20:50 PM12/20/19
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Thanks !

Something similar with chromium ? Do you by any chance have some references to share about it ?

-- Layus.

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Gerardo Delgadillo

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Dec 20, 2019, 4:49:58 PM12/20/19
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For our projects, we use a slightly modified version of Chromium, and we build it with the tool they use: Ninja. So no porting its build to another system. Sorry for the confusion.

Dequan Zhang

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Dec 20, 2019, 4:57:32 PM12/20/19
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Hi Layus, 

For filtering environment variable parts, you can try to use env command. It can be prefixed to gcc command to provide  clean environment for example.

Robin


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Layus

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Dec 20, 2019, 5:11:51 PM12/20/19
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Hi Robin,

This is only part of the solutions. It allows to ignore unknown env vars, but not to track the value of the ones that you use. $PATH being the canonical example.

Your comment fits my point perfectly. You can indeed work around any limitation of Make, but do you really want to do so ?

-- Layus.

PS: BTW, you can also filter env vars with the following trivial Makefile ;-)

```Makefile
.PHONY: all
all:
    tup
```
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