[geos-devel] RFC7: Discontinue use of autotools

[Martin Davis]

Sounds like a great idea to me.  As you say, supporting two build systems
is unproductive and buggy.

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 9:25 AM Daniel Baston <dbaston at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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