Having used WAF extensively in large legacy projects, one of it’s large problems is that it isn’t particularly batteries included, and relies on a lot of customizations, and doesn’t have a lot of rails so it’s really easy to break it’s reliability guarantees. And having a unreliable build where one is never sure if a problem will go away by deleting intermediates is super frustrating.
Not currently, but I do have a half-written article I plan to publish eventually once I complete this project I'm working on, to showcase my use of waf and how it's helped me. That's how much I like it!
But to give you a quick example: my project (a cross-platform game) has a bunch of assets that I am embedding in the executable. To do this, I wrote a custom waf task that automatically generates a char array in a .cpp/.h bundle, and adds it to my build and include paths.
Using that same tool, I am able to embed other assets that need to be transformed in various ways before being embedded. One of those is a bundle of binary files and meta-data combined together inside a single flatbuffer data blob. This involves compiling the schema, generating a small command-line utility to write the blob using the sources generated from the schema compiler, using that utility to generate the blob, and finally embedding the blob using the asset embedding tool. (Plus some of the binary files themselves need to be processed before all of this happens)
I could do that with shell scripts, but waf's design makes it easy to do, in a small amount of reusable code (everything I just described I implemented in <400 lines of python), and in a general-purpose and easy to read programming language. Plus the tasks automatically execute in parallel wherever possible.
> I'm mainly coming at it from the perspective of a distro maintainer. Few pieces of software use waf, and digging into the wscripts can be a pain for large projects.
I've heard that complaint before, and I can see why it would be annoying for outside maintainers. Waf's customizability means two Waf projects might look nothing alike. So even if one becomes an expert at Waf (which is not very easy considering how bad the docs are), they might be completely lost in someone else's project. I failed a game jam once because I was using Amazon Lumberyard (which uses waf), and even though I completed the game, I couldn't figure out how to compile the damn thing before the deadline.
But if it's any consolation, I don't plan on distributing my project through any linux distros :P