[geos-devel] RFC7: Discontinue use of autotools

[Sandro Santilli]

On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 04:25:29PM -0500, Daniel Baston wrote:
> >
> > I suggest proponents do address the points above.
> 
> As I mentioned, Paul added a "make distcheck" in 2019.

I've just tried "make distcheck" from a build/ subdir.
It created a geos-3.10.0dev.tar.bz2 file of 150MB.

The "make dist" command under autotools generates a
geos-3.10.0dev.tar.gz of less than 6MB.

The "make dist-bzip2" command under autotools generates a
geos-3.10.0dev.tar.bz2 of less than 5MB.

Note autotools support all these target formats:

  dist-gzip
  dist-bzip2
  dist-lzip
  dist-xz
  dist-tarZ
  dist-shar
  dist-zip

> I don't know what the motivation was for introducing CMake originally, but
> I'm not sure it's relevant 11 years later.

It's relevant to the extent that _dropping_ cmake would also resolve
the "need to do double work" issue, if it wasn't for Windows.

As per RFC, the reasons you propose to only keep cmake are:

   1. It is used by the majority of active committers
   2. It is the only cross-platform (OS/compiler) build system 

This is it list of most recent commit authors (last 200) intersected
with committers with most commit in repository (top 20), in
alphabetical order:

  Daniel Baston
  Even Rouault
  Martin Davis
  Mike Taves
  Paul Ramsey
  Sandro Santilli

I'm pretty sure the majority of the above committers (also)
use autotools, so the first motivation is not enough.

As for cross-platform features, that I recall Windows is the only
platform that we've had reports of build problems (for MingW not
being evidently easy to setup - this Regina can say more about).

I think binary packagers would have the most informed opinion on the
matter as they are the ones that build on multiple-platforms, usually.
We poor developers mostly build for our single development machines,
so I'd listen carefully to what people like Greg Troxel say.

--strk;