Compiling CERTI suing autotools or CMake

[Eric Noulard]

Hi All,

With recent bugs submission some of you
may want/need to compile;

1) the CVS version of CERTI from a fresh checkout:

    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:address@hidden:/sources/certi co certi

2) A beta tarball release found in
    http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/certi/beta/

As I told in a previous message we are in the process of evaluating
a switch from autotools to cmake as a build system.
I will recall hereafter how to compile  CERTI from sources using either
autotools or cmake.

A) Compiling with autotools
    (http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/
     http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/)

     The basic steps for compiling CERTI on unix machine
     using autotools are the following:

      A.1) tar zvxf certi-3.2.5pre5.tar.gz
      A.2) cd certi-3.2.5pre5/
      A.3) ./configure
      A.4) make
      A.5) make install

this "default" steps will install certi in /usr/local
you may change the install prefix using
      A.3bis) ./configure --prefix=/path/to/prefix

one may use a separate build tree, like this

      A.2) mkdir build_certi; cd build_certi
      A.3) ../certi-3.2.5pre5/configure

the advantage of using a separate build tree is that you
don't put objects files (resulting) from compiling within the source.
Some generated files (the one generated by automake) are
still put in the source tree.

there is another tip to know if you get CERTI from CVS.
When you get CERTI from CVS you don't have the "configure" scripts file
YOU MUST generate the file by running the "autogen.sh" located
at the root of CERTI source tree.

B) Compiling with CMake (www.cmake.org)

     The basic steps for compiling CERTI on unix machine
     using CMake are the following:

      A.1) tar zvxf certi-3.2.5pre5.tar.gz
      A.2) mkdir build_certi; cd build_certi
      A.3) cmake ../certi-3.2.5pre5
      A.4) make
      A.5) make install

This will install CERTI under /usr/local as with autotools.
As you can see separate build tree and source tree
is the favorite way to use CMake.
On the contrary of autotools CMake does not put _ANYTHING_
in the source (unless you force it to do so), such that
you may share the source tree with several build tree.
Using CMake you may build in source but it is not recommended.

We are evaluating CMake because we use it for building CERTI
on windows because autotools essentially work on cygwin but not with
other compiler toolchain like MS Visual Studio.

CMake ease the packaging because of CPack (a CMake add-on)
which support various package format:
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:CPackPackageGenerators

Feel free to evaluate CMake vs autotools for your own usage
and tell us which one you prefer.

Do not hesitate to ask for help for either autotools or cmake usage.
I wanted to keep my message small but there is a lot more
to tell on this topic.


-- 
Erk