(whoops, meant to CC the list) On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:40 AM, Carlos Lopez Gonzalez <carloslopezgonza...@yahoo.es> wrote:
> So the question is: > which is the best strategy to allow synfig to use cmake? I know that it might > be > a very complex question but I want to know which are the major roadblocks I > would find. Anybody has previous experience with something similar? Can you > point to me to any similar case of study? I"m going through the autotools->CMake process now with BRL-CAD. Major things specific to an autotools->CMake conversion: 1. Tests you use that are suppled by Autotools. This is a biggie - all those HAVE_* flags in the code need the same tests, which usually will need to be re-implemented in CMake. Look around before doing it yourself, sometimes people have solved similar problems. CMake has the tools to do this but (so far) does not have a specific library of autotools-compatible tests (if you find one let me know) 2. Sorting out how to manage compile flags for various profiles and platforms - a lot of sorting, categorizing, platform testing here - I'm not even close to done with this aspect of it. Autotools does a lot of automatic stuff, so you will probably find yourself "looking behind the curtain" to see what is going on. 3. Test on lots of platforms and configs - make sure autotools wasn't papering over platform issues automatically and you never noticed. Can think of at least one case where that happened. 4. This is maybe not autotools specific, but if you have key operations in your build that require the presence of sh, sed, m4, etc. (a natural development when you're assuming autotools is there) remember that they aren't available out of the box on Windows - sometimes CMake can be used to achieve what is needed and that will be more portable if you're looking to compile with something like Visual Studio. You have one big advantage - you have working build logic already. If your project has any significant complexity, remember to study what DOES work when you're trying to figure out why CMake doesn't. > I forecast the problem of replace pkconfig tools. Should I use pkconfig inside > cmake or use the .cmake replacements to find the libraries and forget > completely > pkconfig? Are you talking about finding 3rd party libraries? There are some utilities in CMake for taking advantage of pkgconfig I believe, although I haven't ended up looking into that (so far). > In the middle of porting, when ETL would be installed, would the > unported synfig-core and synfig-studio parts (already with autotools) find > properly the ETL libraries? How to proceed in that case? If you're doing a unified build of the whole source, you should be able to add the target name of the ETL library file to target_link_libraries commands for the others, if I understand properly what you are asking. BRL-CAD builds many individual libraries in its source that are used by other libraries, and it hasn't been a problem. > Please be patience with me because I'm just start learning. I have the > Mastering > cmake book and have done a whole read once, so I can understand technical > terminology (or at last can search for it), but I don't have any experience > with > cmake and my experience with autotools is ... well better don't remind me ;) So far I've found the plplot library to be a good resource for practical CMake hints - you might check what they do if you hit a particular problem. Cheers, and best of luck - so far for me the pain of conversion looks to be worth the effort, so hopefully you will find the same. CY _______________________________________________ Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
