CMake/MSVC Support

[Greg Troxel]

Will Bowers <wbowers314 at gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks for the info. Like anyone else, I have personal opinions about CMake
> and Meson, but those aren't terribly important right now. There are some

I have some historical info in a broad brush way.   There have been a
lot of projects that use autoconf/automake and people show up and say
"cmake is better!  Let's switch!".  There is a "but we have to have no
regressions from current behavior" and the cmake people agree, and then
cmake support appears and it has regressions.  Typically they are in
cross build support and in working on platforms the authors haven't
tested on because at least for those implementations, they lacked the
"feature tests only, do not ever  check for a specific OS rule".

So my view, which doesn't officially count, is that to be merged any
cmake support must be:

  as free of "ifdef FooOS" as the previous system

  capable of building cross, just like autoconf

  support all the --bindir/--libdir stuff that autoconf does

  support proper -R and ld flags like autoconf/libtool does

  support building the code and running tests, with it testing the
  just-build code *even if there is a previous version installed*.

I think you will find it harder than it seems.

Making small fixes to improve portability is of course a separate
matter.