Richard Heck wrote: > On 06/03/2016 04:28 PM, Scott Kostyshak wrote: >> On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 09:38:09PM +0200, Kornel Benko wrote: >>> Am Freitag, 3. Juni 2016 um 12:42:33, schrieb Richard Heck >>> <rgh...@lyx.org> >>>> I guess maybe there is a question worth discussing here about how many >>>> of us understand cmake well enough to modify the build scripts when >>>> that needs doing. My sense is that the answer is "one", >> I also think this is and important question. >> >>> In alphabetical order: >>> Georg >>> Peter >>> Scott >>> Vincent >> I do not know CMake well. I suppose I do know enough to make minor >> modifications. I've been learning from Kornel and would put more effort >> into it if we did decide to move to CMake for our official builds. But >> the point remains that at least in the short-run I think we would depend >> a lot on one or two developers that have a lot of CMake experience. > > It may be then that things are better than it seemed. But Vincent isn't > really active nowadays, and I'd like to hear from Georg. From what I've > seen on the list, he hasn't always seemed completely comfortable, > either, though it's true he does post some patches to the cmake stuff, > and of course he can learn.
I do not really understand cmake. I am able to do very simple modifications which are basically copy-paste, but I tried several times to understand the cmake language and always failed. Each time I needed a non-trivial change I had to ask Kornel. However, this is not so important. With autotools we have only very few people who understand the macro stuff in m4/, config/ and configure.ac, but everybody is able to do his modifications to the various Makefile.am. I am pretty sure that cmake can be setup in a similar way, so that we have the complicated parts that need expert knowledge and are not changed often, and the easy ones that can be changed by everybody. We cannot afford having two build systems, this is a waste of time. So for me the question is not about the official build system, but about the only one, and since autotools cannot generate MSVC files the only solution is to use cmake (I know none widely used build wystem that is better than cmake). IIRC the known show stoppers for making cmake the default build system are some missing features when building the release packages, and the GLOB stuff. I would suggest to make a comparison table of build system features in the wiki, and everybody adds the ones he needs. Then we can see which build system supports which feature, and how much work it would be to implement the mising ones in cmake. One thing I noticed recently is the version suffix: Which autotools you can use an arbitrary one, with cmake you can only toggle between a predefined one or none at all, which is a problem if you want to compare two different builds of the same version with separate configurations (e.g. qt4/qt5 or different compiler settings). Georg
