[Ns-developers] build stuff and downloading external deps

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 15:46 +0000, Tom Henderson wrote:

> >> So, I don't see much extra advantage of having a separately invoked
> >> download.py script to run if the above options work.
> >
> >The issue is that our build system is growing increasingly complex
> and a
> >lot of functionality needs to be duplicated in a couple of locations.
> I
> >would like to avoid that.
> >
> 
> OK, I understand; I was just giving you my user perspective.  If the
> download pieces are broken apart from the configuration pieces, I
> would probably write my own wrapper script to do both.

Another issue is that, if we convert nsc to use waf to make the
configuration a bit smoother, and if we download nsc from a configure
waf function, how can we restart the waf configuration after nsc has
been downloaded ? We would have to fork/exec waf to run it on the nsc
subdirectory but that does not work due to some waf weirdness. 

There are, unfortunately, many constraints which make it hard to provide
a really smooth user experience and, I agree with you that it would be
easier to not do anything about it. I find this pretty frustrating :/

Mathieu