wishlist: provide alternative build system

[cdluminate]

The memory consumption for bootstraping bazel is very huge, according to my observation.
And I really have trouble building bazel on my machine because lacking of enough memory.

So could you please provide an alternative (traditional) build system (e.g. make, cmake) or setup.py,
for users who insist on building software from source by themselves.

Thanks.

[rajasrijan]

+1

[ysoo1133]

+1

[davidzchen]

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but if you are observing Bazel using excessive amounts of memory, then it is a problem that we should fix.

I have opened bazelbuild/bazel#670 to track this issue. @cdluminate Can you provide some details about the following:

1. How much memory does your machine have?
2. How much memory are you observing Bazel using to build itself?

Also, have you considered using the Bazel binary installer? If so, are you also observing huge memory usage while building TensorFlow?

[cdluminate]

@davidzchen Actually I'm not sure whether I've encountered a BUG when bootstraping bazel, but anyway I'll try to describe what I've seen while bootstraping bazel, in bazel issue 670.

[christopherowen]

+1

Bazel's java dependency is not preferable.

[davidzchen]

Looping back from bazelbuild/bazel#670: the memory consumption issue appears to be unrelated to Bazel. According to @cdluminate, the issue went away after a kernel upgrade.

[ageron]

It sounds like adding support for CMake builds would be helpful. I'll give it a shot.

[ageron]

I just submitted Pull Request #728 to add very basic CMake support to TensorFlow. It builds the tutorial C++ training example (along with all dependencies).

Limitations: no GPU, no python, no tests, no install targets, tested only on MacOSX, and needs a bit of code cleanup. It's a first version to get the ball rolling. I'll continue to work on it, your comments are more than welcome.

[bhack]

I like Cmake but we have experienced many misalignments problems in Caffe community maintaining two build systems. Every extension or contribution that involve the build system need to be double checked. And often developer don't have confidence with both build systems contributing code with partial coverage or different quality level. Android cmake support was not really maintained and never incorporated officially (see taka-no-me/android-cmake#64)

[cdluminate]

So that means the synchronization problem between multiple build systems should also be concerned.

[martinwicke]

We're aware of the issues surrounding having multiple build systems. We'd definitely prefer if bazel would just work for all platforms (in particular, #16, #17, #110), and we're pretty confident it will work for most people in the near future.

However, it's clear that for some platforms (especially embedded), that's a while off, and cmake seems like a good solution, especially if we can find a (semi-)automatic solution to generate the cmake. It would also solve the immediate packaging issues mentioned in #720.