[Liblas-devel] Migrating to CMake for the next libLAS release

[Howard Butler]

All,

As you may have seen from the recent threads about Windows compilation, Mateusz has been hard at work on a CMake [1] configuration for libLAS, and I would like to migrate the project to using it full time.  To adapt an extremely hyperbolic comment by Joel  Spolsky [2] about Subversion vs Mercurial, if libtool/autoconf/nmake is leeches, CMake is antibiotics.  

My own experience with CMake has been quite positive, and I find it really nice to be able to generate XCode and MSVC projects with CMake along with hands-off makefile builds that have generally been the focus of libLAS building.  While I am much more familiar with libtool/autoconf and nmake configuration, I am finding that the cross-platform goodness is too much to pass up on, and having consistent configuration across all of the platforms we support will be much easier for people in the long run.

It's becoming clear to me that CMake is becoming the best of breed in this category (previously held by the GNU autoconf/libtool toolchain for the only reason that no one else was crazy enough to challenge it), and its implementation within libLAS will provide us some nice wins.  

To that end, the current mainline tree no longer has nmake files in it, and once I finish up the configuration to allow building against a GDAL source tree, the autoconf stuff will be going away as well.  

Happy building,

Howard

[1] http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake
[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17.html