on 06/28/2008 04:20 PM Mats Lidell said the following:
>>>>> Vladimir wrote:
Vladimir> CMake? SCons?
Both of these build systems seems to have interesting features
indeed. However, isn't both lacking in the respect that the end user,
eg the user building XEmacs from sources, needs to have them?
The build requirements are really not that onerous. I don't have any
experience with either system, so I don't speak authoritatively and
I'm not pushing either option, but here's what I've found out:
SCons depends on just Python (already installed in all Linux
distributions) and CMake has no additional requirements. Both systems
are available pre-packaged for Gentoo, Fedora 9, Debian/Ubuntu and
apparently cygwin, so the overhead for a person wishing to build an
XEmacs that would use them is not high. I don't know about
pre-packaged versions for Windows or Mac OS X, but both claim to run
and build (natively) for those environments.
The tradeoff seems to be XEmacs build maintainer time (and sanity) vs
a small, possibly zero, user/builder overhead. (It turns out that both
were installed on my Gentoo and Fedora systems.) Since I'm not the
XEmacs build maintainer, officially I don't care.
That being said, I'm partial to the idea of replacing a build
environment based on make and autotools. As a person with a passing
interest in programming languages, I'd prefer SCons because it uses
Python, a full-fledged, modern, widely-used, multi-paradigm,
programming environment that comes with many, many libraries with even
more available as add-ons.
But, as I said, I'll defer to those who are directly affected by the
choice of build system: it's not my call (just as Mercurial wasn't).
--- Vladimir
--
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
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