3 ms·

What technology are you folks using that forces you to look at (and actually edit) a configuration file just to build your project? Are there actually still we

What technology are you folks using that forces you to look at (and actually edit) a configuration file just to build your project? Are there actually still well-used languages that don't have a development environment that takes care of this for you? (serious question). Granted, we have an automated build system that requires hand tweaking from time to time, but that's something we introduced ourselves. If I wanted I could still hit shift-ctrl-b on any box and have a working version of the project. (And in all the flavor-of-the-month web techs it's usually just a matter of pointing a browser at the source.)

brazzy 16y ago
Are there actually still well-used languages that don't have a development environment that takes care of this for you? (serious question). Yeah, all of them (serious answer). Granted, we have an automated build system that requires hand tweaking from time to time, but that's something we introduced ourselves. An automated build system that A) does not require someone to sit in front of a machine and press a button to start it. B) doesn't just produce executables based on a working copy, but is aware of SCM (including branches), runs unit tests (and sends alert mails when they fail), does code analysis, and can be arbitrarily extended to do whatever else you need is NOT a luxury, but an essential requirement. If you don't have it, you're not developing, you're toying around.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  So you're saying the article is talking about scripts for continuous integration servers. That makes a lot more sense. I had read the comments here to mean that people still have to toy with scripts just to get their project to compile. So you're saying that the source -> executable problem is indeed solved for every language. It's the (source control) -> (source code) + (db change scripts) -> (QA Website) + (QA Database) problem that we're talking about. I didn't gather that from the article.
  - brazzy 16y ago
    I'm saying that "source -> executable by pressing a button in an IDE" might be nice for developers, but is utterly irrelevant overall, because you need to be able to build the project without that IDE for lots of different reasons. CI is one, another (most relevant to autoconf) is allowing people to build the project on multiple platforms where the IDE may not even exist.

brazzy 16y ago

Are there actually still well-used languages that don't have a development environment that takes care of this for you? (serious question). Yeah, all of them (serious answer). Granted, we have an automated build system that requires hand tweaking from time to time, but that's something we introduced ourselves. An automated build system that A) does not require someone to sit in front of a machine and press a button to start it. B) doesn't just produce executables based on a working copy, but is aware of SCM (including branches), runs unit tests (and sends alert mails when they fail), does code analysis, and can be arbitrarily extended to do whatever else you need is NOT a luxury, but an essential requirement. If you don't have it, you're not developing, you're toying around.

jasonkester 16y ago
So you're saying the article is talking about scripts for continuous integration servers. That makes a lot more sense. I had read the comments here to mean that people still have to toy with scripts just to get their project to compile. So you're saying that the source -> executable problem is indeed solved for every language. It's the (source control) -> (source code) + (db change scripts) -> (QA Website) + (QA Database) problem that we're talking about. I didn't gather that from the article.
- brazzy 16y ago
  I'm saying that "source -> executable by pressing a button in an IDE" might be nice for developers, but is utterly irrelevant overall, because you need to be able to build the project without that IDE for lots of different reasons. CI is one, another (most relevant to autoconf) is allowing people to build the project on multiple platforms where the IDE may not even exist.