stability, always a few versions behind

Several of our projects use waf and Vala, which I normally have nothing but good things to say about, but this is an exception. At the moment, we're stuck working with outdated versions of both.

Tonight I tried upgrading from Waf 1.5.10 to 1.5.16 and was unable to get any of our packages to build with it. As it turns out, it doesn't seem to like glib (maybe the "-" or number in the package name?) and fails to record its cflags and libs to pass to gcc during building. If 1.5.10 didn't have a few annoying bugs of its own or if we could patch and "compile" 1.5.10 we'd be fine, but even this version we had to use the "binary" (compressed Python script) from their website as we couldn't get a Python 3 version to build from source.

Despite all this, it is very nice to have a small, clean build system that both supports Genie and runs on Python 3. The small workarounds we've had to do are worth the savings in headache and frustration autotools/scons/etc would cause us.

With Vala, apparently nobody did even a casual check to ensure the Genie parser was still working properly before releasing valac 0.8.0 (now up to 0.8.1), and a basic example from the language's frontpage (command line argument parsing) compiles but fails to link. For now, we're all forced to stick with valac 0.7.10 until the problem is solved or someone suggests a workaround. Its unfortunate a few of our devs run Ubuntu 10.04 which doesn't offer valac 0.7.x as a package.

Good news is I'm almost finished debugging expat.vapi (Expat bindings for Vala/Genie) and David is sprinting ahead with xml config file parsing with it. By this weekend we could have XMPP routing with the new server being branched off from Concordance-XMPP.