Re: WIP: About CMake v2

On 9 November 2016 at 10:12, Michael Paquier <michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 7:54 AM, Craig Ringer
> <craig(dot)ringer(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> On 9 Nov. 2016 06:37, "Yury Zhuravlev" <u(dot)zhuravlev(at)postgrespro(dot)ru> wrote:
>>> This approach I see only in Postgres project and not fully understood.
>>> Can you explain me more what reasons led to this approach?
>>
>> It's predictable. The default has the same result for everyone. I quite like
>> it myself.
>
> +1. Let's tell to the system what we want him to do and not let him
> guess what we'd like to be done or it will get harder to test and
> develop code for all kind of code paths with #ifdef's. That's one step
> away from Skynet.

Er... ok then. (Backs away slowly).

More seriously, I like it for development where a stable and
predictable default is great.

For users it slightly sucks, as most users will want us to find
whatever is on the system without being manually told to enable each
feature. "Of course I want SSL, I have openssl installed don't I?"
It's not like we require users to specify --enable-largefile
--enable-atomics --enable-getopt --enable-ipv6 .... we do detect a
lot automatically.

So personally I think it'd be fine if a cmake build defaulted to
finding and using what it could, but offered a --minimal mode or
whatever that gets us just core postgres + whatever we enable
explicitly. But our current behaviour is OK too.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services