Switch to mach

[Manishearth]

Using makefiles for testing is rather broken (for example, if you want to run a different test via TETNAME=foo make-check-stage2-runpass, you have to delete the runpass binary and re-call make).

I suggest we move as much of the testing and other infrastructure out into mach, Mozilla's supercharged-make-in-python. Servo has already made this switch and the workflow is much smoother. The ./mach build command can internally call configure/make (at least initially), and instead of setting environment variables for various test tweaks we can set command line flags.

If I get time I'd love to work on this, but I'd like to know if this is really wanted first :)

[emberian]

How is the story on Windows?

[Manishearth]

It's python. Works fine.

...though of course there will be some kinks along the way. Firefox uses some MozillaBuild stuff for windows deps — I don't think they have anything to do with the python stuff, but they might do something special — and Servo hasn't touched Windows :)

We'd need to add python as a dependency on windows and that's it as far as I can tell.

[emberian]

Can it be used with only a python interpreter, and no other supporting programs, as installed from python.org?

[Manishearth]

Hmm. Not sure, but Servo's version seems to be self-contained (all the deps seem to be in-tree)

[Manishearth]

(Note: Either way I'm only considering this post-1.0)

[alexispurslane]

Should someone start working on this? It seems like this is an ancient issue.

[ranma42]

Is this superseded by #31590 (rustbuild) ?

[Manishearth]

No, mach is more of a wrapper around cargo to provide utility shortcuts

[alexcrichton]

Looking at this now, with rustbuild we're probably not going to switch to mach, so I'm going to close this.