On 12/13/2011 09:57 PM, Roman Suvorov wrote:
Hello QPID Devs, I'm a graduate student at Queen's University writing a course project on build system refactoring. I read Steve Huston's article on his blog that was published in 2009 discussing why you chose cmake and how the transition was done and I was wondering if you have any additional information I could use for my research. Namely, can you elaborate on: - the most important reasons for adopting CMake over Autotools? What pros/cons of both systems mattered the most for QPID developers? - did the fact that KDE successfully adapt cmake play a significant role in you picking it too?
Yes.
- did you receive much help from cmake developers in designing your build system?
No, other than the documentation of course.
- how long did the transition take and how did it progress?
Sadly we did not transition. We are using 2 build systems in parallel. Each has features that the other does not so different subgroups of the Qpid community use each system. This is a painful situation that you should try to avoid.
Our mistake was to get cmake running in parallel to the libtools system "till we get it finished". Of course we never got finished because the libtools crowd (including me) were always too busy doing other things and they could get along fine with the libtools system. If I were doing it again I would get the cmake build to where it appears to cover all bases and the *delete* the libtools build. Any remaining gaps/issues in the cmake build system would rapidly be fixed since they would block people from working. Actually we could still do that to our build, but I'm a bit too busy at the moment to take it on...
- were Apache QPID developers responsible for writing CMakeLists and other required files for their own packages (dispersed development) or is there a build team that was in charge of producing those for all QPID packages?
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