On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 1:36 AM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Up until now, the focus has been on making Makefile.in's themselves generic > and data-driven [1]. We would use pymake's API to parse, load, and extract > data from Makefile.in's to construct the build definition. In the long run, > we'd realize that using make files for data definition was silly (and a > large foot gun) and thus we would switch to something else.
Can you expand on that? From the discussion so far, JSON is not expressive enough and Python is too expressive. There are some very understandable reservations about inventing a new language, as well as the desire for a "clean slate" (admittedly attractive). Why doesn't it make sense to use a very-restricted dialect of Makefiles? pymake already has a parser, the dumbing down of which to disallow arbitrary shell expressions would supposedly be fairly straightforward. No one would have to learn a new language, and you can start with the current files, duplicate the parser inside pymake, then start to dumb it down as you weed the complexity out of the Makefile.ins. Cheers, Dirkjan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
