[Bf-committers] CMake minimum version increased to 3.0

[Jeffrey]

The issue is making the dev (or user, like me) jump through hoop after 
hoop just to get it building. It's difficult enough to build and 
troubleshoot your system, but adding new, not-readily-available 
requirements only compounds the problem. By "readily available" I mean a 
package update or additional package in your package manager like yum or 
apt. Then if you have to rebuild a system, or build a new one, you need 
to redo or remember how the system was modified in order to recreate it. 
Granted, install_deps.sh does a pretty good job of getting the required 
libs for blender, but this is a safeguard for building locally only. 
Would it be realistic to provide this automated build method for every 
new lib a new cmake will require?

Then what about cmake-gui? Not everybody can or wants to use the 
terminal to the extent a power user can. You can't use an older version 
of the gui on a new version of cmake, so then you'd have to build the 
gui as well. What else does this mean? Maybe newer library versions than 
your distribution provides. I've had this problem numerous times when 
trying to build less complex software, to the point of not being able to 
or getting too frustrated with the requirements to do it (some 
essentially required a whole rebuild of my system).

The issue is that distros like CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu LTS are built 
to be stable, which inherently means using older, harshly-tested, proven 
software. For example, Fedora 23 is the current version, which is 
approximately three years ahead of CentOS 7, the most recent release. 
How can you support both of these systems when their software versions 
are lightyears apart?

On 11/09/2015 05:45 PM, Howard Trickey wrote:
>> the issue isn't about Ubuntu 14.10 specifically, its mainly that
>> someone can have a year-old installation which wouldn't be able to
>> build Blender (without manually getting CMake at least).
>>
>>
> I was in the situation (Ubuntu with 2.8 CMake); it only took a few minutes
> to download the latest CMake release and put it in a private place and fix
> my PATH to use it.  So maybe this isn't such an onerous requirement.
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-- 
Jeffrey "Italic_" Hoover