From: Warren Young
Date: September 19 2005 4:54pm
Subject: Re: Bakefile
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Vaclav Slavik wrote:
>>Yes, the state of the docs concerns me, too.  Too many FIXMEs and
>>too much hand-waving. 
> 
> Not sure what you mean by "hand-waving", 

It's a rhetorical technique used to distract the listener so they don't 
stop to analyze the argument for completeness or rigorous logic.  :)

Just as an example, I do not see anywhere in the docs where the -f 
switch is completely documented.  That makes it hard to evaluate just 
what Bakefile is capable of generating.  I had to read the change log to 
get a sense of Bakefile's scope.

But my documentation critiques weren't aimed at you.  They were just 
observations for this mailing list, in the context of evaluating it for 
our needs.  I would have made a list of specific problems (or maybe even 
provided patches) if I had intended those comments for you.  In fact, if 
I do start using Bakefile, I'm quite likely to start patching the docs, 
since you're also using DocBook.

>>- Can it handle our new library soname scheme?
> 
> It doesn't use libtool, 

Okay, new question, then: how widely tested is shared library 
generation?  There's essentially no standardization for this sort of 
thing on *ix systems, which is why libtool exists.  Linux is different 
from Solaris, which is different from Mac OS X...and that's without even 
talking about historical oddities like OSF/1.