[geos-devel] RFC7: Discontinue use of autotools

[Greg Troxel]

Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca> writes:

>> On Jan 8, 2021, at 9:25 AM, Daniel Baston <dbaston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>
> I agree. I can think of only one further technical task, which is
> ensuring that the outputs of the cmake 'make dist' target are run
> through to 'make check' in CI. Being able to bundle a release via
> 'make dist' is a very handy thing and makes 'tag to release
> automatically' a potential CI target which would also be nice.

One thing autotools does that many cmake setups don't (but could) is
'make distcheck' which does

  make dist

  unpacks it

  does an objdir build

  runs make check in that

  does so in a way that the just-built libs are used and installed libs
  are ignored

If that already works in cmake, fine, and if not I think that needs
fixing before getting rid of autotools.

The other thing is cross builds, and I have no idea what the state of
that is in the geos cmake build.  Often I have found that build systems
proposed as a replacement for autotools don't do that.
   
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