I accidentally sent my last reply to Norman off-list, to paraphrase what was said:
This experimental build system is much more intrusive to the host system than the current Make system, and is pretty alien to most users.
As for more parrallelism, that is a claim that I can't back up yet, but this system has the odd behavior of building objects for mulitple dependencies before linking anything together. I expect per-object complilation times to be more than that of the Make system, but I hope to gain an edge in evaluation time. Realistically I won't know for some time if this system can scale up to the same size as the Make system with comparable performance.
- Less boilerplate.
- Less user interaction.
Can you please substantiate those points a little? Are you referring to the installation of the tool-chain?
I was thinking of port and run targets. The ports issue was fixed in the last release so I expect the verbosity of those to be about the same.
As for test runs, I can trim those down quite a bit but I don't yet have a good idea on how to implement the details of per-platform drivers. Norman pointed out that a test run is quite a different thing than a package and configuration for a set of components, and that is something that I will have to consider when generating init configs and boot images.
As far as less user interaction, I meant that once you get over the hurdle of installing Nix, the system can handle all the details of managing the toolchain and other tools.
My latest piece of news is that I can actually make good on one of those fantastic claims that I made, I have a working continuous build and test server: http://hydra.hype.im/
This saves anyone who is curious about the state of this experiment the effort of trying to reproduce it themselves.
For example here is a peek of what is building and what is not: http://hydra.hype.im:2828/project/genode/all
Once I get NOVA working I'll see if I can get it to make ISO's of run targets available for download.
Emery