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Comment by jgh | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough, I stand corrected. Superficially it seems like a more pleasant experience than dealing with gn/ninja as an end user.

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As an end user it's absolutely better. I'm just torn between pride and embarrassment thinking about how it was implemented.

I think my favorite part of the build process was when we frobnicated libstdc++:

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/master/Makefile#L...

And then there were the hijinks we went through to build a cross-compiler with modern gcc and ancient libc (plus the steps to make sure no dependency on later glibc symbols snuck in):

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/master/build/link...

Ahh... now that was a build system.

I saw this in the Makefiles, and -- ah, the life of distributing proprietary Linux software. At one point in a prior job, we just replaced our build system with a wrapper Makefile that 'chroot'ed into a filesystem image that was a snapshot of one of our build machines, since it was so difficult to set up. This meant we (developers) had easier system updates, security upgrades, etc. That was just the tip of the iceberg!

Now you can "... be beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love [you] and despair!" with a build inside docker; the host can run a modern kernel ; your image can run Slackware 0.1 ;-)

(with apologies to Tolkien)

I'm curious what you think is wrong with gn/ninja (besides the fact that it's non-standard). My problems building Chromium come mostly from other parts of depot_tools.

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