Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> That, or we create the makefiles in a fixed system and keep the
>> Makefiles in CVS (though would be derived files).
> IIRC, we previously looked into cmake and concluded it supported a lot
> fewer platforms than pgsql.
> However, if we can go by Alvaros suggestion and keep the makefiles as
> derived files, that could certainly work...
Not really, as it still disenfranchises developers who don't have or
know how to use cmake (or whatever tool you select). This is not like
bison or flex, which you can avoid learning and still be able to work on
many interesting parts of Postgres. If you can't work with the build
system then you can't even add a new source file, and that's a pretty
crippling restriction.
The situation as we have it right now is not satisfactory on this
point either. The lingua franca is gmake, which is fine for all the
systems we've historically supported, but it disenfranchises would-be
developers who use MSVC; they likely don't know gmake or even have it
installed.
I've never worked with cmake, but the info on their home page sounds
like it would work on all the systems we are interested in. I think
the $64 question is whether we can make it sit up and do all the tricks
that are in our Makefiles now. In any case, the conversion cost would
be pretty darn sizable --- not only the effort from a few people to do
the initial conversion, but the distributed costs of all developers
having to learn cmake. I'm not sure we want to go there ... not yet
anyway ...
regards, tom lane