I don't disagree that there are many more settings bundled than should be. That doesn't mean that the whole build system needs to be thrown out. The necessary changes could certainly be made without requiring that the currently built modules be rewritten to use the new build system.
The "new" build system doesn't really have any makefile or configure support at the current time, and as you've pointed out, doesn't seem to have tackled the splitting of things out yet.
My primary concern is that there's no qualification of the "new" way of doing things that it's not completely baked yet, and won't result in monger compatible modules (which I suspect is a large portion of what people are doing, outside of one-off personal projects).
Bill
On Aug 11, 2008, at 11:05 AM, Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS @ Pike developers forum wrote:
The old system has a basic design flaw that way too many build settings come with pike and don't work where the module is compiled. As I understand it, that's difficult to fix in the old framework.
On the basic technical level it's clear how it should work: Settings that affect the ABI (some CFLAGS, a number of macros in machine.h, etc) should come with pike, but not anything else. There's really no room for choice as a matter of policy.
Then how to get there is a different matter. I seriously doubt the new system works correctly in this perspective either, because that'd require a deep split of machine.h - it contains both many ABI-defining macros and many configure test results. I haven't seen any hint of that getting sorted out, but I can confess that my knowledge of the external module building stuff is hazy.