Custom toolchain build script generator draft

[wesm]

@grundprinzip for comments -- what I am not sure about is how to specify a toolchain for a new project. For example, suppose you wanted

gflags=2.0
gperftools=2.3
googletest=20151222
glog=0.3.3-p1

Probably should specify the requirements and platform-dependent logic in a Python file rather than some text file

[caseyching]

I was thinking about converting all the shell stuff into python. I'm not sure we want to have a python script that generates shell, seems a little too complicated?

[wesm]

The package build recipes themselves would be easiest to leave as shell scripts because they're self-contained and only require certain environment variables to be set. As a first step we should replace buildall.sh and build.sh (top level) with Python.

We are reinventing wheels here; can we investigate using conda as the basis of this package management? This is exactly what it is designed for

https://github.com/conda/conda

[caseyching]

Conda looks interesting, I'll check it out. Thanks!

[ghost]

Another way to test customer toolchain is from Impala's CMakeFiles. see http://gerrit.cloudera.org:8080/#/c/2263/. with that change creating new jenkins job for testing is relative easier.