[Qgis-developer] Time to retire OS X Xcode project

[William Kyngesburye]

It's been a bit (lot?) of work maintaining sync with the cmake build.  Other problems with it (both new and from day 1):

- non-user-friendly configuration (hand-edit a file!), though I had an idea to patch in configuration from cmake

- no automatic optional target compilation - if you didn't want or didn't have the support for an optional plugin or feature, you had to build individual targets

- the dependency tracking of Xcode never worked right for custom compile rules (moc, rcc,...) so recompiling a partially-compiled source or after changes to sources always recompiled those with custom rules, even if they didn't change

- the builtin yacc/lex rules don't work right, and custom rules are cranky, which leads to the final straw today when trying to add a new yacc/lex pair for the raster calculator change - failure


Not to fear!  I've taken the plunge into cmake and have been working on a cmake overhaul for the OS X build.  I was going to wait for after the sudden 1.6 release, but since I'm not having luck with yacc/lex in Xcode I should have at least the core changes done for 1.6 (up to bundling Qt frameworks is done now, but not in SVN yet).

Part of the cmake overhaul is to make sure library linking is all fixed up (it's been a problem in the past).  Another improvement is cleaner (and automatic) detection of my frameworks (needed for bundling to work).  The main improvement is making the bundling steps part of the install.

There may be a small delay for my binary packages for the 1.6 release while I finish the bundling scripts (or I figure out a hack in Xcode for the yacc/lex problem).


Things I will miss from Xcode:

- debugging in the Xcode GUI, though I haven't needed to set that up so far

- nothing else really, Xcode/Cmake doesn't matter to me as long as it compiles QGIS and bundles everything needed for release

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William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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