Re: CMake build anyone?

[Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 23:34, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:

> A CMake install is required.

Why? (Note: I'm talking only about MSDOS/Windows.)

You envision CMake as substituting the current Windows building
environment wholesale.

My idea is more like this:

- We have the configuration files in some place, like admin/setup.
They are common for all ports (Unix, GNU/Linux, NextStep, MSDOS,
Windows, etc.).
- Developers, or users with CMake, can run the tool and (re)generate
the makefiles. These makefiles get committed to the trunk/branch, and
contain dependencies which are always needed, like gcc / msvc, etc.
- Users or the tarballs or checkouts can run nt/configure.bat (or
equivalent) to create the additional setup info (for example, paths to
include files for the image libraries).

I.e, I think the easiest transition path is having CMake as a tool
*for the maintainers*, to regenerate the makefiles. It's not optimal,
and I don't doubt that switching to a CMake-only build system would be
advantageous; but it introduces a new dependency and it is perhaps too
radical a change. Instead, we can use it like the makeinfo stuff or
the Unicode data files from admin/unidata are used right now: the user
can regenerate info or uni-*.el files, but it is usually not required.

> For the time being, we can put MSDOS aside and go ahead if cmake is seen
> as convenient enough by the Windows maintainers.

As long as it is an alternative and not a replacement, it seems like a
good idea worth trying IMHO.

All this conditional on RMS, Stefan and Chong not opposing using CMake
as an alternate build system for political or technical reasons, of
course.

    Juanma