Hi all, thanks for your fast replies!

On Tue Feb 25, 2025 at 10:26 AM CET, Timo Röhling wrote:
1. There are no "big" new features, the major version bump happened
because deprecated features have been removed. So the benefit of CMake 4.0 compared to 3.31 is relatively low, but the cost of broken backwards compatibility is significant [1], especially this late in the trixie release cycle.

Makes sense. My main concern was just that it *looks* big, and people might say "oh, Debian is **still** on CMake 3". But that's of course nonsensical, and given it's a non-trivial effort it's really just not worth it.

2. I maintain backports releases for CMake, so if someone really needs or wants CMake 4.0 in trixie, they will be able to install it from trixie-backports.

This is great news! Thanks for your work on the CMake backports, it's one of those things I regularly need :)

I will upload CMake 4.0 to experimental, though, so it may not end up in trixie, but it will be available soon(ish).

Great!

[1] A quick Debian code search with the regular expression

   (?i)cmake_minimum_required\s*\(\s*VERSION\s*([12]\.|3\.[01234](\s|\.))

shows 4155 hits involving 1420 source packages. Patching debhelper does not solve the issue either, because it is a behavior change that most likely requires a compat level bump.

Woah, I didn't realise the scale of the issue, I assumed there were way less packages to touch.

On Tue Feb 25, 2025 at 3:51 PM CET, Brad King wrote:
I will probably do several more release candidates for CMake 4.0.0.

Got it.

In many cases the project's `CMakeLists.txt` file just needs to be updated to say it is aware of CMake 3.5 (or higher). CMake has been issuing warnings for years on projects that have not been updated.

FYI, CMake 4.0 provides help for packagers:

* https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v4.0/variable/CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM.html

Yeah, I mentioned it as part of the debhelper patch in the original message.

Thanks both for your replies! Feel free to close this if you like, or keep it here as reference for others.

Bye :)

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