[Chicken-hackers] Re: [Chicken-users] Release candidate for 2.5 available

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Mario Domenech Goulart wrote:

Hello,

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:34:29 +0200 "felix winkelmann" <address@hidden> wrote:

  

This release contains mostly bugfixes and can now be built using
CMake (using CMake is the recommended build method for Windows. I
had problems building with CMake on Linux, but the newest CVS
version seems to work ok).
    

No luck with cmake under Linux either (haven't tried the darcs version
yet).
  

Above, Felix is saying he got the Chicken CMake build to work using "CMake CVS version."  I've found it straightforward to compile CMake CVS on Windows, but I haven't tried Linux, and I wouldn't expect anyone to undertake such a step in any event.  Just saying it's probably quite doable if you really really want to try.  Anyways, if CMake CVS does in fact solve all the Chicken CMake build problems, then that means CMake 2.4.4 will solve the problems when it is released.  I don't know if there are workarounds for CMake 2.4.3 in the meantime.  Aside from my heavy time constraints as of late, I don't have access to Linux or Mac machines, so I'm not a great person to chase down these issues.

In principle, I could set up a dual boot on my PC at some point, so I would at least have Linux.  In practice, I do no development on Linux at all, and have no plan or reason to, so I'm not personally interested in taking on that support burden.  Open Source is unfortunately an invitation to a lot of support burdens that prevent real work from getting done, like OpenGL and games with Chicken Scheme, for instance.  I think the best way to mitigate the realities of open source, is for people to put their energy into the platforms they're most interested in supporting and fixing.  That is, I'm primarily interested in the MinGW support, and I test MSVC and Cygwin because those are fairly straightforward for me to do.

A small note about the CMake build instructions at the
INSTALL-CMake.txt file: the GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS SUMMARY section tells
me to

  - run CMakeSetup on Windows, or run CCMake on Unix, Cygwin, and
    MacOS

In fact, on the systems I've tried (Ubuntu Linux), the CCMake program
is called ccmake (all lowercase).
  

Well sure, and if you access CMakeSetup on the command line under Windows, it is / can be called "cmakesetup".  I don't consider this an error.  Rather, it is important for people to notice a difference between CMake and CCMake.  I think the capitalization helps slightly in this regard.  The "cookbook" steps for actually using it do show "ccmake" all lower case, so if people need that level of instruction, it's there.  Thanks for your attention to detail, though.  Details can definitely derail a build.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every