[geos-devel] RFC7: Discontinue use of autotools

[Daniel Baston]

Hi,

I'd like to propose that we revisit RFC 7 [1], introduced in October 2018,
which proposes that we use CMake as the exclusive build system for GEOS.

The CMake configuration was added to GEOS 11 years ago and has been
officially supported since release 3.5, over five years ago. The CMake
configuration has built up strong community momentum and has attracted
contributions from 12 developers. Continuing to maintain the autotools
configuration increases the effort for developers to contribute to GEOS. I
frequently have to re-submit pull requests to address problems in the
autotools build, losing 30-60 minutes of productive time each occurrence.

For reference, the last discussion of this issue on geos-devel was in
October 2018 [2]. To my knowledge, the technical issues discussed in that
thread have long since been resolved. For example, the autotools-like
targets ("make distcheck") discussed in that thread were added by Paul in
2019. I think the remainder of the discussion boils down to build system
preference. There are plenty of good reasons for preferring one build
system or another, and I don't expect every member of the GEOS community to
prefer CMake. I think the question we need to resolve is whether, after 11
years of working with and 5 years of officially supporting two build
systems, we need to continue to spend developer effort maintaining both
systems in order to accommodate those preferences.

Thoughts?
Dan

[1] https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/wiki/RFC7
[2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geos-devel/2018-October/008586.html
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