Re: Heads up: CMake build system for libobjc

[David Chisnall]

On 13 Dec 2012, at 16:53, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> I'd prefer a gnu-make makefile, just because it is what is used for the rest 
> of gnustep.

libobjc2 is used by other projects outside of GNUstep, including projects that 
do not use GNU make.

I am sorry if I somehow managed to phrase my original message as if it were a 
request for comments on the merits of various build systems.  It was not, and 
such bikeshed discussions have been done to death elsewhere and are not 
productive.  It was a notification that the new build system for libobjc2 is 
CMake.  We have tried alternatives, and they have not worked well.  Richard has 
attempted to maintain a GNUmakefile.  I have tried to maintain a portable 
Makefile, but have suffered from the limitations of POSIX Make.  

There were three possible alternatives:

- Autoconf
- CMake
- Some ad-hoc thing

As the person who is going to be maintaining it, I picked the tool that I am 
happier working with.  It is CMake.  I do not wish to spend a significant 
amount of my GNUstep development time maintaining a build system or fighting a 
build system.  I wish to spend it writing code.  

I do not wish to have extra parallel build systems maintained by other people 
in the tree, because that has caused confusion in the past both among packagers 
and among people building from source.  I want to make life easy for building 
packages, and CMake does this: it exports the configurable options in a way 
that is easy to parse and package managers already have a lot of infrastructure 
for dealing with CMake from packaging KDE and other things that use it.  

David