[graalvm-dev] Avoiding NINJA dependency

[Josef Eisl]

Hi Foivos!

On 28/04/2020 22:34, Foivos Zakkak wrote:
> Hi Christian,
> 
> The issue is that the build system does not have internet access and it
> also doesn't support pypi, thus the build fails when trying to fetch
> ninja_syntax (ninja can be installed through the repositories but
> ninja_syntax is not available). We can add exceptions but we try to keep
> those to a minimum.

It seems like ninja_syntax is a single python file with ~180 lines
coming directly from the ninja project. Isn't there is some way of
getting this file onto your build system? (For example, it is included
in the ninja-build src rpm as far as I can tell.)

> 
> Would a change like the one suggested by Gilles, that would make mx
> resort to makefiles only when a special parameter is passed to mx, be
> acceptable?

Maybe but how to ensure that things wont break? Running every CI job
twice (at least those with a ninja project dependency which is almost
everything in graalvm) to see that the generated Makefiles do the same
as the Ninja build seems like spending a lot of resources.

That said, I would not veto such a change if you agree to maintain it,
but IMHO it seems like a lot of afford for a "package not available on
the build infrastructure" kind of issue.

Cheers,
Josef

> The Makefiles should preferably be generated to avoid the need of
> maintaining them and we could add checks to allow the use of this flag
> only on specific platforms. 
> 
> Thanks,
> Foivos
> 
> On 28/04/2020 21:42, Christian Wimmer wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Ninja is a pretty established build tool. Why is the dependency a problem?
>> Our initial hand-written make files were not portable (especially to 
>> Windows). Automatically generating make files (or nmake files on 
>> Windows) seems like making things worse.
>>
>> -Christian
>>
>>
>> On 4/28/20 06:31, Foivos Zakkak wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I am trying to avoid the dependency on NINJA when building native 
>>> libraries like libchelper.
>>> Are you aware of any way to achieve this without manually writing Makefiles?
>>>
>>> Additionally, if I were to write the required Makefiles and alter the 
>>> corresponding suite.py files is there any chance such a change would 
>>> make it upstream or is NINJA the only way forward?
>>> I see that makefiles are only used by sulong at the moment.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> -- 
>>>
>>> Foivos Zakkak
>>>
>>> Senior Software Engineer, R&D Product Middleware
>>>
>>> Red Hat 
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.redhat.com__;!!GqivPVa7Brio!IxC-AQYSTh7M2kDyVowp6AdQFBTypGVR3YBR31dp586yDD2u6XGy0_Nxre--NZSYbjpwaA$> 
>>>
>>>
>>> 7B4069D929BAAE91C0B3220A0846BFD103F04EA1
>>>
>>>
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