[cmake-developers] A policy for Policies

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday, June 08, 2015 09:57:14 Brad King wrote:
...
> This may be okay for CMP0011, but CMP0024 and CMP0026 were much
> more recent (3.0).  I think 5 years is a more reasonable cut-off
> than 2 years, especially given the time it takes CMake versions
> included in older distro releases to fall out of common use.

Yes, I fully agree, 2 years would be quite quite short.
The buildsystem should do its job, and not get in the way and create 
additional work.
I love that cmake still works on old projects, and doesn't fail when updating. 
I can remember all the hassle with autotools if some versions did not match, 
and I'm so happy that this is just not the case with cmake.

We have a lot of feature and time pressure at work (I guess most people around 
have that), and not having to babysit the cmake code for a long time is great.

If the conclusion would be a policy is removed after 5 years, it's deadline 
could even be part of the error/warning message right from the point when it 
is introduced ("you are relying on CMP1234 OLD behaviour. This will be removed 
June 2020.").

Then I could (at work) ignore this maybe until 2017 or 2018, and then it would 
slowly rise in my priority, and at some point I would fix it in some spare 
time.

Alex