Build Systems Discussion

5 hours ago

The post discusses designing a build system for permacomputing, focusing on the ../lua/civ build system and a proposed package manager.
A good build system must explicitly define all inputs and outputs for each build phase.
Make is criticized for being a collection of shell scripts with platform-specific syntax and lacking an overarching structure.
Another principle is that a build system should allow programmatic configuration of inputs and outputs for different target systems.
Civ's solution uses a configurable 'sys hub' that abstracts file locations and build logic through a minimal, well-defined API.
Civ's implementation is lightweight (1000 lines of C utility libraries and ~100 lines of Lua), unlike Bazel which forks Python and is more complex.
The proposed package manager includes a 'hubrepo' (a git repo) that stores hubs and dependencies, allowing version locking via a .civ.lockfile.
To submit code to a hub, developers must create a pull request that includes tests and documentation, which is auto-merged by a bot.

Hasty Briefsbeta