The current minimum version of CMake that our build system will accept
is 2.6.4. That is a concern for the following reasons:
1. There are a lot of known bugs in that ancient version of CMake.
2. Language support is quite different for 2.6.x compared to 2.8.x so
there is a lot of special logic in our build system to handle both
cases, and it would be a nice simplification to drop the 2.6.x case
of that logic.
3. It's been a long while since I (or anybody else) have tested PLplot
with CMake-2.6.4 so it is quite possible we have introduced
features into our build system that only work with CMake-2.8.x.
Because of these concerns I plan to change the minimum CMake version
our build system will accept to something much more recent.
I suggest CMake-2.8.6 (the most recent release) should be the minimum
version for Windows since there is an important bug fix for recent
versions of MinGW in that version of CMake. CMake-2.8.6 also
has better support for modern Windows platforms.
For Linux there is some additional convenience to our users if they
are allowed to use the system version of CMake rather than being
forced to download a newer version. So I suggest the minimum version
of CMake for Linux (and Mac OS X) should be CMake-2.8.2. That was
released 16 months ago so there is a good chance that CMake version or
something later is the system version for modern Linux distros. For
example, that is true for Debian Squeeze (2.8.2 is the system version
there), and I assume it is also true for recent Ubuntu, Fedora, and
SuSe releases. Of course, those forced to use ancient Linux distros
(such as the enterprise-class and long-term support Linux distros) at
their work will have to download a modern CMake for themselves.
However, that is easy to do, and large improvements (e.g., Fortran
support) have occurred for every release of CMake in the 2.8.x series
so 2.8.2 is probably the oldest version in that series that we should
support.
If I don't hear any strong objections to changing the minimum version
of CMake to 2.8.6 for Windows and 2.8.2 for all other platforms, I
plan to make this important change to our build system early next week
(probably Monday).
Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________
Linux-powered Science
__________________________
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