This week I had to abandon my attempts to develop on Ubuntu. It seems NVidia's Ubuntu drivers lack support for some of the OpenGL calls libsoy's windowing system is making. So I am now developing solely on Mac OS X. My OS X install has X11 support, so after my initial struggle trying to compile libsoy at the beginning of the summer, I've been able to run libsoy almost without a hitch.
One thing missing, though, is cwiid support. That's fine, since cwiid is an optional dependency for the Wiimote controller. It's easy to set a dependency as optional in wscript: you just add the "Mandatory=false" flag to your conf.check_cfg(). So the configuration doesn't error out. However, the one deceptively difficult issue was in telling waf to avoid compiling the Wiimote.gs controller if cwiid is not installed. So the build breaks.
I'm the only one really affected by this issue, so I set out to learn a little about Waf (by reading the Waf Book). And I found myself trying all afternoon to make a change that on its surface seems quite simple. There are too many source files to add them to Waf's task generator one by one, and bld.add_subdirs() does not make it easy to add constraints. So I toiled around with extending Waf's TaskGenerator class for a while. Nothing doing. So, failing that, I just used ant_glob to generate a list, and wrote an if statement that removes the file Wiimote.gs from the result, if cwiid cannot be found in the configuration.
I spent hours trying to build a sexy solution, only to settle for a kludge. It's a lesson I have a hard time learning -- I should have rolled out that little bit of hackery to begin with. Sometimes the best way makes you feel a little dirty, but it's still the best way. Problem solved; onto the next one.
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