How many of us understand how autoconf and friends work? How many are able to effectively edit and maintain the build process? I spent a few days during the 0.45 dev cycle working to add soft linking for libssl. Most of my time was spent in total confusion. And when I asked around no one among us was able to give much help. I find this a little scary. And I wonder if there isn't a different build system out there that more of us could become proficient in.
For lib2geom Verbalshadow decided to give CMake a try. I'm not sure what led to this decision. I think he looked at Scons and a few others first. Maybe because a huge project like KDE is using it. I found out recently that our sister project Scribus is also switching to CMake. You can read their happy rants:
http://rants.scribus.net/2006/05/20/cmake-rocks/ http://rants.scribus.net/2006/05/20/cmake-certainly-does-rock/ http://rants.scribus.net/2006/07/16/a-little-help-from-your-friends/
Verbal and I have been pretty able to take care of things with CMake. But I'm not sure I can make a recommendation for or against anything because I really don't know that much about build systems.
We also have Bob's build system to consider. I'll let him give you the details.
I'd like to use this thread to enumerate our needs for a build system. And I'd like to request some volunteers to help me evaluate any alternatives we find.
The general needs I know about are:
- maintainable by our team - crossplatform support - availability to our end users
Build systems I know of include:
- gnu auto* (what is the proper name?) - Bob's buildtool - Scons - Cmake
People interested in finding and evaluating a new build system:
- Aaron Spike
Please add to these lists.
Aaron Spike