[vtk-developers] Moved Mirkwood ninja dashboards to nightly

[Berk Geveci]

It seems to me that there are two orthogonal issues here. (I apologize if I
misunderstood part of this thread since some of the CMake specific text is
hard for me to follow).

- What should we do with supporting Ninja as a build system? AFAIK, it used
to work but it was broken when some changes to the Python wrapping were
introduced. Do we know if these changes exposed an issue with the Ninja
generator (or Ninja itself) or if they contain some dependency bug?

Bill: This is not a straightforward as saying that a commit broke what used
to work, therefore we should support it. If the fix is the right fix but
exposed a bug in the generator or Ninja, we shouldn't work around doing the
"right" thing just to make Ninja work again. Specially, given that we never
sanctioned it. I know that there were also issues with using Ninja to build
ParaView and in some cases, it is necessary to use another build system.

I never used Ninja but folks that have swear by it. So if it is possible to
at least have a path forward, it would be a nice feature that improves
developer productivity. It doesn't meant that we support it by VTK 6 (which
is soon!) but it may mean that we make some concerted effort toward it.

PS: I'd like to remind everyone that we have limited resources in both
funding and people. Not everything is going to be supported.

- What should we do with Mirkwood? If there is a path forward to supporting
Ninja, we should probably leave those dashboards using Ninja but turn off
Python wrapping until we start making some progress towards fixing Ninja
support. Then we can flip Python wrapping back on and voila, we have a
dashboard to test it. If we decide that there is no hope for supporting
Ninja in the near to mid future, then it is probably best to switch them to
another build system. Maybe there is a combination of stuff we are missing
on the dashboard?

Best,
-berk


On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 4:52 PM, David Cole <dlrdave at aol.com> wrote:

> So back to the original email that sparked all this today... I'm curious
> about what I should do with the "mirkwoood" submissions.
>
> Berk, should I submit a ninja dashboard at all? Without python to make it
> green, or leave python ON and wait for an eventual fix somewhere?
>
> Or should I switch to a different generator? (jom, nmake or Visual Studio
> 10?)
>
> Or just discontinue submissions from mirkwood since it's such an old
> machine anyhow.
>
>
> Let me know what you think I should do with mirkwood. Right now I have it
> using ninja still, but have turned off python since it doesn't work with
> ninja right now.
>
>
> Thanks,
> David C.
>
>
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