Build too painful [LWN.net]

Build too painful

Posted Oct 11, 2008 14:29 UTC (Sat) by crow (guest, #96)
Parent article: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

You're not going to attract developers when it takes several hours to build the code. If they redo their build system to be simpler and much faster, then it would be more attractive to developers to play with.

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Build too painful

Posted Oct 12, 2008 5:16 UTC (Sun) by andikleen (subscriber, #39006) [Link]

The code base is just big and takes some time when rebuilt from
scratch. No good way around that.

But they have a prebuilt development kit. With that you only
need to recompile the parts that you're actually changing, the rest
is just reused from the download. That works because it is pretty
modular.

With projects of that size many of the old habits just don't scale
anymore. You'll have to live with that.