About CMake (was Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Append major version number and for libraries soname major)

On Sunday 21 December 2008 00:59:27 Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > We (i.e. probably Magnus and I in the first instance) should think about
> > creating a bit of a cookbook if we're going to persist with this build
> > system.
>
> Well, we were going to try CMake, but we need somebody to do the work.

It did play around with CMake a while back. It works OK. I had libpq and
psql building, for example. The problem I see is that converting the build
system will probably take many man-hours, and in the meantime, it would
essentially create yet another build system to maintain. Plus, we are not
sure, of course, whether we will end up adopting CMake.

My preferred approach now is that the existing makefiles need to be refactored
more aggressively first, using make functions. We could incidentally design
those functions similar to the CMake declarations, so a conversion, if we
decided to do one, would be simple. But doing that properly would require a
newer GNU make version, so it needs some consideration first. (I'm not
talking about last week's release, but more like 4 years old versus the 10
years old that we currently require.)

We can revisit this for the next release cycle.