(Starting a new thread because this is separate from the deprecation policy.)

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Daniel Roßberg
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> There could be other users/systems which run into trouble because of
> CMake and the CMake version required.  E.g. your own server
> ftp.brlcad.org has CMake 2.8.2 installed but BRL-CAD requires version
> 2.8.4.  There may be other more important systems with a similar
> problem.  Until now using autotools is a workaround.

There are four possible approaches to dealing with that issue:

1.  Require upgraded CMake versions be present
2.  Limit the features present in the build system
3.  Put lots of version conditionals around features requiring newer
CMake versions
4.  Include a subset of CMake that *is* modern enough and bootstrap it
at need (on platforms where that is practical - Windows bootstrapping
is its own unique problem (as usual) but autotools didn't handle
Windows building anyway.)

At the moment #1 is the practical requirement.  I'm very reluctant to
go with either #2 or #3 - the former puts a cap on what features we
can support (or at least greatly increases the amount of work it takes
to suppor them) and the latter is a maintenance nightmare.  #4 is a
possibility we've already discussed (even fairly straightforward in
theory, given a sufficient level of comfort with shell scripting and
the logical "hook" for a CMake check offered by the configure.cmake.sh
option translation script), but not something we've tried yet.

If too-old versions of CMake are a problem for too many people, I can
do a little experimenting with the #4 option.  As Daniel says it will
become really pressing only when the autotools fallback is gone.
Given a properly behaving CMake bootstrap, the build requirements for
a CMake BRL-CAD build would be back down to the current
post-autogen.sh autotools build requirements - sh and a compiler.  It
would also have the benefit of not requiring us to keep local copies
of CMake modules that have been accepted by upstream in our own
misc/CMake directory, reducing our own maintenance overhead.

Cheers,
CY

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