[mapguide-internals] MapGuide open source builds - Linux & Cmake

[Jason Birch]

I can see your point Frank, but from my layman's perspective cmake is a lot more approachable than the existing build system, and by default it seems to do sane things like building into a different tree than source, etc, etc.  I also remember someone saying that it was considerably faster?
 
To look at it another way:  Helio has already done the work to create a cmake-based installer that provides much better Linux support, presumably because it was easier for him to do this with cmake.  Linux support is an extremely weak point for MapGuide, and the primary developers only have a vested interest in supporting RHEL/CentOS builds.  Unless someone else has time/energy to duplicate Helio's efforts using the existing build chain, I'm in favour of moving to cmake for the MapGuide Linux build procedure.
 
As far as Windows builds go... Unlike other open source tools, MapGuide's primary development is done in Windows.  It doesn't make sense to replace the manually maintained VS-based projects with automatically generated ones when most of the developers spend the majority of their time in VS anyway.
 
Jason
 
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From: Frank Warmerdam
Subject: Re: [mapguide-internals] MapGuide open source builds - Linux & Cmake

I don't feel like I ever really understood what cmake would be accomplishing
for us if we only used it on Unix.  I'm concerned we are substituting a
build system we know nothing about for a build system we at least sort of
know.  Perhaps the main benefits of Helio's work are getting away from the
dependency on our own copy of third party libraries, or stuff like that.
If that is the case, then why not pursue that more directly?