[Bf-committers] Makefile support

[Stefan Gartner]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 19:51 +0100, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I already gave up on Makefiles for OSX a month ago or so... it was  
> giving me inpredictable instable builds, and trying to figure out why  
> I gave up after a day.

On OS X the Makefiles have troubles finding the right (external)
libraries in lib/ and the proper compiler/linker flags, maybe that's
what's causing the instabilities. I've been experimenting a bit with a
fix for that and didn't notice any problems.

> 
> It seems to me it's still used by a couple of people here. I'd like to  
> know if there's - apart from personal taste - there's important  
> reasons to keep supporting it? The system is close to collapse under  
> its own weight, seems to me. :)
> 
> Let me confirm that switching to CMake was painless and quick and it  
> builds faster than ever. I'm not totally happy with the noisy colorful  
> prints of cmake, but I'm quite sure that's a matter of time to get  
> solved too.
> 
> Obviously; if we remove makefiles from svn, it'll allow "in source"  
> builds for cmake.
> 

I've tried using cmake on Irix briefly and it failed building, I guess
this was because it was trying to link against the system libraries
instead of the much more recent libs from svn. If that can be fixed or
configured easily, I wouldn't mind switching to cmake, especially as
this would allow doing parallel builds.

greetings,
stefan