Getting There from Here

February 9th, 2009

The New Yorker has a great article about reforming the US health care system entitled “Getting There from Here.” It’s not terribly long and if you’re at all interested in the topic I’d recommend reading it. It discusses how other nations with universal health care arrived at their present systems, which is a topic that seems completely absent from debate on the subject in the USA. Anyway, I’m not really posting here to talk about health care, but one part of this article rang true with me in other ways:

There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.

As owner of the Mozilla build system, I hear a lot of complaints. This is understandable, our build system is showing its age, and we are certainly straining against the limits of Autoconf and GNU make on a regular basis. Along with complaints, I hear a lot of suggestions of the form “why don’t you just use X“, where X is any of a number of alternative tools such as CMake or SCons. The basic answer parallels the quote above. Because we don’t have time to stop and rewrite everything. Our build system contains tens of thousands of lines of makefiles, as well as a configure.in that’s over 8,000 lines. Converting this much build junk by hand is doomed to failure. Converting it through automated tools might be possible, but we would need a smart plan, and it would likely involve testing the tools in parallel with the existing build system for a while in order to make for a smooth transition. In any case, it’s clear that if we are to find a way forward, it will require building on what we have, and not burning it to the ground and starting over from scratch.

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2 Responses to “Getting There from Here”

  1. BSBlog » Blog Archive » pymake: A Mostly GNU-compatible `make`, Written in Python Says:

    […] not completely happy with our current recursive-make build system, converting to something else is a very difficult task. In order to consider other solutions, we have to have a seamless migration path from our existing […]

  2. Bread and Circuits » Watching pymake get built Says:

    […] has a lot of Makefiles, and for every Makefile, there is also a person complaining about some aspect of the build system.  For example, building Mozilla on Windows is slow compared […]