You may recall that back in March I promised to convert the libssh2 build system to CMake 'soon'. Well, 9 months later, it is more or less complete: https://github.com/alamaison/libssh2/tree/cmake. I would greatly appreciate your feedback and help with testing on the platforms that matter to you.
The goal is to match or exceed every relevant feature of the autotools system like-for-like, so, unless otherwise stated in this email, assume that any missing functionality is a bug. Please report it. CMake, however, is fundamentally different from autotools, so some features (for example, building source distributions, aka `make dist`) aren't relevant anymore and aren't specifically catered for. The README should get you started but, if you need help getting accustomed to CMake, I'm very happy to answer any questions you have. tl;dr - A version of libssh2 using CMake is available at https://github.com/alamaison/libssh2/tree/cmake - Please test Platform support ================ I've tested the build with the three major platforms, Linux (GCC 4.6.3, Clang 3.4), Windows (VS2005, VS2008) and MacOS X (AppleClang 6.0.0), in a variety of configurations. I've also set up continuous integration using Travis CI [2], so libssh2 is continually tested on Linux in 32 combinations of OpenSSL/Libgrypt, 32-bit/64-bit, GCC/Clang, shared/static, with/without zlib. I've not been able to test with VMS or Netware, two of the more unusual platforms that we support. I don't have access to that kind of hardware, so any help testing would be greatly appreciated. Why? ==== If you are wondering what benefits this change brings, there is plenty of discussion about this out there about the merits of CMake, but the main reasons that it makes sense for libssh2 are: 1) We were trying (failing?) to maintain build files by hand for non-autotool platforms such as Windows. As well as being a waste of effort, these custom jobds rarely kept up with libssh2 development. For example, they are hardcoded to use OpenSSL even though libssh2 supports multiple crypto backends. Using CMake we are now able to build libssh2 for all the common platforms and crypto backends using a single build configuration. When it is updated to accomodate a new feature, all platforms feel the benefit simultaneously. 2) Even if we supported your _platform_, our build setup restricted your choice of development environment to GNU Makefiles on Unix or Visual Studio 6 on Windows. Using CMake we can now generate the necessary files for your choosen environment: GNU Makefiles, Visual Studio 2005-2014, Xcode, Eclipse CDT ... and many more [1]. 3) CMake makes it easy to automatically fetch and build a projects as a component of a larger CMake project. This a big deal for a library. 4) For better or worse, CMake has won the latest war of the C/C++ build systems. This makes it the focus of new innovation and the support community is very active. As more and more projects are adopting it, they can take advantage of 3). What doesn't work yet? ====================== I've already mentioned that I've not been able to test VMS or Netware, so I'm going to assume that doesn't work simply because I've not done anything with the code in the `vms` and `nw` directories yet. It's possible that that code is redunant for CMake but, if not, I'll adjust the build files if a VMS/Netware user can explain to me what they need. Compiling with OpenWatcom works but I'm having trouble linking against OpenSSL. Using WinCNG also doesn't compile and it seems to be a SDK issue. Can anyone familiar with that compiler help me understand what extra steps are necessary? Another issue with OpenWatcom is that version 1.9 doesn't work if CMake is installed in a path containing spaces or parentheses. The bug is with the compiler, but I've filed a CMake issue to request a workaround [3]. Libssh2 inherited some complex compiler warning settings from cURL. I've not ported this to CMake yet because I want to understand the goal first, so that I can do this in a cross-platform way. For now, I've turned on -Wall or /W4. Would anyone like other warnings enabled? If so, which? Any changes committed to develop since I branched are not yet integrated into the cmake branch. That's the next job. Thanks for listening. Fire away. Alex [1] http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.1/manual/cmake-generators.7.html [2] https://travis-ci.org/alamaison/libssh2 [3] http://www.cmake.org/Bug/view.php?id=15279 -- Swish - Easy SFTP for Windows Explorer (http://www.swish-sftp.org) _______________________________________________ libssh2-devel http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libssh2-devel
