[Aptitude-devel] Towards a better build system

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2010-04-29, Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> wrote:
>   Ok.  I'm not emotionally committed to scons -- I have a nearly

I'm also not specially emotionally committed to cmake, but I must admit
that I'm quite emotionally committed against scons.

> complete "proof of concept" build system in the tree, but I wasn't
> especially impressed.  The only thing I can say is that the result is
> better than autotools, but only just.

What's the metric for better? :)

>   That said: I looked at the CMake Web site a bit last weekend and
> noticed that their FAQ says you can't build source distributions with
> cmake.  Ew?  I'll reserve judgement until I see your proof-of-concept,
> though.

what do you mean by 'source distributions' ?

I'm almost thru with a cmake proof of concept. It didn't take many hours 
for one with almost no experience with aptitude codebase.
There are the following known limitations
 - aptitude-gtk not built
 - some data files not yet marked for installation
 - some things is the config.h generation is hardcoded
 - a bit of hardcoding the names of various libraries. proper FindFoo
   macros should be found/written
 - docs and translations not handled yet

I do have a couple of questions:
 - is it correct that aptitude is designed to do a 'two pass' build,
   first building aptitude and then creating a different config.h and
   building aptitude-gtk ?
 - is it correct that the boost_test tests doesn't build?

I do get a aptitude-curses launched now, and the cppunit tests does
work without failures.

I expect to get gtk to work tonight, and then I will post the results
before starting looking at the docs, as they seem to require quite some
work to get built.

/Sune