[Bf-committers] Removing Build Systems

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi all,

We currently have 4 build systems being maintained: Makefiles, SCons, 
CMake and MSVC. Making changes for 2.5 development and doing merges 
for all 4 has gotten quite tedious and I've lost days fiddling with 
all these build systems. Further it seems that compilation breaks 
often because of lacking build system updates, which again takes time 
working with people in #blendercoders to get things building again.

I thought the idea was that new build systems like SCons or CMake 
would replace existing ones, but that hasn't happened and things have 
just gotten more complicated instead of simplified.

Could we remove some of these? Of course all of them have some 
advantage, but 4 seems unnecessary. In particular I'm proposing to:

- Remove the Makefiles build system
- Fix a few things in CMake to get it generating MSVC project files up 
to the same quality as the existing ones, and then remove the MSVC 
build system.

SCons I think we should keep because it is well maintained and easy to 
use. CMake can generate native project files and is much faster than 
SCons on older systems. So we can keep both of these I suppose, though 
one would be ideal.

What do you think?

Brecht.