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From: Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 21:56:18 -0800
Message-ID: <CAGw6cBsAdr=hfyk_vKrUyuBhkmWBf9RB=CT0+T08v76Pif5RAg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Proposal: replace ninja with samurai
To: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

On 2019-12-07, Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com> wrote:
> I've been using samu as my daily driver for a few years now, and I've
> yet to meet a project it couldn't compile. Its performance is also
> comparable to ninja. A samurai package is available in community on edge
> if you would like to try it for yourself.

In my testing, samurai is slightly faster than ninja and uses less
memory. Of course, this is a negligible part of complete builds, but
it is nice during development for incremental builds.

In preparation for releasing samurai 1.0, I built all Alpine packages
that used ninja. The aports branch I used is at [0]. Here are the
results:

## community/chromium

The tools/gn/bootstrap/bootstrap.py script hardcoded `ninja`, and it
passed options to ninja after the build target. samurai doesn't do
GNU-style argument permutation, so this failed. I submitted a CL to
fix this, which is now submitted at [1].

I wasn't patient enough to let the build finish after fixing this, but
I've built chromium multiple times in the past from the git
repository, so I don't expect any other issues.

## community/fwupd

The coreboot module was missing a dependency on the generated
fu-hash.h. This is now fixed upstream in [2].

## community/grilo

The APKBUILD had $source containing a patch auto-generated by gitlab,
which doesn't appear to be stable, so the checksum failed. This is
unrelated to samurai, but I submitted a patch to fix this at [3]. The
build succeeded after this.

## community/knot-resolver

The APKBUILD invoked ninja with options (`-C build`) following the
build target (`install`). As explained above, samurai doesn't do
argument permutation, so the arguments needed to be switched around.

## community/qt5-qtwebengine

Similar to chromium, this package hard-coded 'ninja', and needed some
changes to allow 'samu' instead. This should not be a problem if you
provide a compatibility symlink /usr/bin/ninja -> samu. I submitted a
change to make the ninja command configurable at [8].

## community/weston

The presentation-shm demo client was missing a dependency on the
generated xdg-shell-client-protocol.h. This is now fixed upstream in
[4].

## testing/wob

This package was missing dependencies on the generated
wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1.h. I submitted a pull request to fix this
at [5].

## community/gtk4.0

The build failed because the linker used too much memory and was
killed, but the build was progressing smoothly up until that point.

## main/libinput

This package failed its test due to missing /dev/fd, presumably
because I wasn't running udev. I created a symlink /dev/fd ->
../proc/self/fd, and the tests succeeded.

## community/libhandy, testing/libzim

These packages failed their tests (logs at [6][7]). I don't believe
this is related to samurai.

## community/gom

The tests hang for me. I don't believe this is related to samurai.


Note that any instance of missing dependencies can also affect ninja
depending on the maximum number of jobs and how long they take to run.

-Michael

[0] https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/compare/master...michaelforney:samurai
[1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1975453
[2] https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/commit/9bdb96f768f1318ccaac4ecbcac68200a36ee1be
[3] https://lists.alpinelinux.org/~alpine/aports/patches/3179
[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/ba3b384b930f9ab40f94d125d4d26bc4b636821f
[5] https://github.com/francma/wob/pull/23
[6] http://ix.io/24Qr
[7] http://ix.io/24Qq
[8] https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtwebengine/+/285134