Ryan's awesome Jamfile-engine should be included in the Haiku nightlies / releases

[kallisti5]

Makefile-engine is included, it only makes sense that Jamfile-engine also be included in the Haiku source tree. /boot/develop/etc/

​http://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/the_art_of_jamming_all_parts

​http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/samples/Jamfile-engine.zip

[bonefish]

IIRC Ryan mentioned that it still has some problems, which is AFAIK the reason it isn't included yet.

[leavengood]

Updating the Jamfile-engine is one of those long term but apparently low priority tasks of mine that I've been meaning to do, but haven't made the time for yet. I think the current version works to some extent, but I know it has bugs, and I want to rewrite parts of it based on all we have learned in the Haiku Jam build system. Maybe I can knock this out this weekend, since I want to do some Haiku work anyhow.

[kallisti5]

even if it is only partially complete it would be nice to have in the source tree so changes could be tracked. :)

[leavengood]

OK that is a good point. I'll see about adding the existing version to our repo then when I get time I can try to refactor it.

[mmadia]

Do you have a list of the issues/bugs in Jamfile-engine?

[mmadia]

Replying to leavengood:

OK that is a good point. I'll see about adding the existing version to our repo then when I get time I can try to refactor it.

Any thoughts on including this in r1a2, to get some additional exposure?

[Disreali]

Is it functional? If so, why not put it in folder named 'Experimental'?

[leavengood]

I'm sorry for dropping the ball on this guys. Obviously I haven't had the motivation to work on Haiku stuff lately (other things have been higher on my list.) But I've finally put the above Jamfile-engine in the Haiku repo, where the makefile-engine is (trunk/data/develop) in hrev36796. I'll leave this ticket open until I've at least done some testing and have added it to the image as well.

Regarding bugs, one I remember off-hand is that the OBJ directory cannot be created properly before building by the Jamfile-engine. In other words you have to run jam once to create it (for the first run when it doesn't exist) and then run jam again to actually build the project. Annoying, but not critical. For any other bugs I would need to test more.

[Disreali]

Has any progress been made on this issue?

[leavengood]

Not really. I have used the Jamfile-engine on a few small projects and it still has at least the bug about failing to build the first time if there is no build directory. It isn't yet included in the Haiku image either.

I'm spending most of my Haiku time these days on WebPositive, and even on that I haven't had much time lately.

Honestly the priority of this probably won't increase until closer to the R1 release, when having this as a developer tool would be more useful for third party developers. There just aren't all that many third party Haiku developers yet.

[luroh]

Moving out of R1 milestone (Prop #15).

[pulkomandy]

I moved it to a separate repository and added an haikuports recipe.

Change to remove it again from Haiku sources since that's not needed anymore: ​https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/4720