Re: would it be time to replace scons with meson build system?

[Greg Troxel]

Bernd Zeimetz <address@hidden> writes:

> On 2/5/20 3:26 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
>
>> This rules out cmake, which needs C++11, and for me, has a personal
>> track record of having difficulty building it due to tracking C++
>> features way too fast.  And, (perhaps this is unfair) cmake-using
>> projects tend to have a lot of code in CMakefiles that has per-OS ifdefs
>> when they should have feature tests.
>
> cmake should support c++ 98, 11, 14, and 17 just fine, fail to
> understand the problem to be honest. Could you give an example what
> exactly fails when using cmake?
> And that some projects do stupid things is something you do not have to
> repeat to use cmake.

I meant that if the system you are trying to use cmake on doesn't have a
C++11 compiler, then you can't build cmake and thus you can't use it.

I don't really remember the details, but a few years ago somebody
updated cmake in pkgsrc to a new version, and I had trouble building it
on systems that are somewhat but not extremely dated (roughly halfway
between where ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 are now) because the system's
compiler's ability to deal with newer C++ standards was not quite up to
what camke needed.

This has now been ok lately, as we are now in a world where not having a
C++11 compiler means you can't build many things, and so far cmake has
not seemed to require C++14 or C++17.  But, a tool that is foundational
should be very slow to jump to new language flavors, and I don't have
confidence that cmake will continue to be free of trouble building it.

I agree that if you build cmake, then yes it works to build programs in
older/newer c++ or C99..