Re: WIP: About CMake v2

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> People have all kinds of expectations on how the build system behaves.
> It's not just ./configure; make; make install. All kinds of niche and
> edge cases have evolved over the years. Variables you can set,
> overrides, targets in some subdirectories, building in subdirectories
> and having it build another subdirectory first, testing this way and
> testing that way, testing with a custom locale or a custom database
> name, building before testing or not, testing without reinstalling, and
> so on and so on. You'd have to make sure at least some of that
> continues to work or be able to explain it away. And most of it is not
> really documented.

...which is another argument for just not changing anything. I mean,
again, the current Windows build system is unbeautiful and
occasionally takes some work, but if we switch to cmake, that has to
get enough better to make up for all of the things that get worse.
And it's far from obvious than this will be so, especially when you
consider the fact that many people have detailed knowledge of how to
tweak the current system to do what they want. As you point out here,
a lot of that stuff may stop working if we replace the system
wholesale.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company