Colin Patrick McCabe created HADOOP-8368:
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Summary: Use CMake rather than autotools to build native code
Key: HADOOP-8368
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8368
Project: Hadoop Common
Issue Type: Improvement
Reporter: Colin Patrick McCabe
Assignee: Colin Patrick McCabe
Priority: Minor
It would be good to use cmake rather than autotools to build the native (C/C++)
code in Hadoop.
Rationale:
1. automake depends on shell scripts, which often have problems running on
different operating systems. It would be extremely difficult, and perhaps
impossible, to use autotools under Windows. Even if it were possible, it might
require horrible workarounds like installing cygwin. Even on Linux variants
like Ubuntu 12.04, there are major build issues because /bin/sh is the Dash
shell, rather than the Bash shell as it is in other Linux versions. It is
currently impossible to build the native code under Ubuntu 12.04 because of
this problem.
CMake has robust cross-platform support, including Windows. It does not use
shell scripts.
2. automake error messages are very confusing. For example, "autoreconf:
cannot empty /tmp/ar0.4849: Is a directory" or "Can't locate object method
"path" via package "Autom4te..." are common error messages. In order to even
start debugging automake problems you need to learn shell, m4, sed, and the a
bunch of other things. With CMake, all you have to learn is the syntax of
CMakeLists.txt, which is simple.
CMake can do all the stuff autotools can, such as making sure that required
libraries are installed. There is a Maven plugin for CMake as well.
3. Different versions of autotools can have very different behaviors. For
example, the version installed under openSUSE defaults to putting libraries in
/usr/local/lib64, whereas the version shipped with Ubuntu 11.04 defaults to
installing the same libraries under /usr/local/lib. (This is why the FUSE
build is currently broken when using OpenSUSE.) This is another source of
build failures and complexity. If things go wrong, you will often get an error
message which is incomprehensible to normal humans (see point #2).
CMake allows you to specify the minimum_required_version of CMake that a
particular CMakeLists.txt will accept. In addition, CMake maintains strict
backwards compatibility between different versions. This prevents build bugs
due to version skew.
4. autoconf, automake, and libtool are large and rather slow. This adds to
build time.
For all these reasons, I think we should switch to CMake for compiling native
(C/C++) code in Hadoop.
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