[geos-devel] RFC7 - Use CMake as build system for GEOS

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2018-10-03 4:20 PM, Sandro Santilli wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 02:14:32PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> Sandro Santilli <strk at kbt.io> writes:
>>> On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 12:38:50PM -0400, Daniel Baston wrote:
>>>>
>>>> https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/wiki/RFC7
>>>
>>> One of the reasons why I still prefer autotools is its ability
>>> to build tester scripts which work before install (via libtool).
>>> Does cmake allow for that ?
>>
>> Testing before install, while the previous version (including libraries)
>> is installed, is to me a requirement for a build system.  Also cross
>> building.  People keep telling me that cmake does everything auto* does,
>> but I wonder.
>>
>> Perhaps we can drop camke and just have autotools, and native windows
>> (vs mingw/cygwin) users can fund keeping the separate windows makefiles
>> up to date (yes, that's mostly a joke).
> 
> The current situation is really that CMake is a contributed module and
> the official build tool _is_ autotools. The problem reported in that
> RFC7 is not well-posed in that it assumes contributors are _required_
> to support multiple build systems. Truth is they only need to support
> autotools, but are convinced CMake is enough because they find the
> CMake support in there. If we drop CMake support, they won't bother.
> 
> How problematic would that be for contributors ?
> 

Can you define what you mean by "that" in your last sentence?  What are 
you proposing?

-jeff