[CMake] Re: Bugs in cmake-2.4.6, please solve for 2.4.7

[Brandon Van Every]

On 7/17/07, Axel Roebel <Axel.Roebel at ircam.fr> wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 July 2007, cmake-request at cmake.org wrote:
>
> From: Hendrik Sattler <post at hendrik-sattler.de>
> > Zitat von Axel Roebel <Axel.Roebel at ircam.fr>:
> > > So in short: if you intend to be portable with the current
> > > and the upcoming version of cmake
> > > better don't use VERSION and don't use EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL.
> >
> > So what? Xcode and Cygwin Makefiles generators are broken, that's no
> > reason for me to not use the stuff that works with all others.
> > On MacOS X, you can probably use plain Makefiles instead?
>
> Very wise, as long as you use the project yourself you can do
> that. If you publish your project and you get users complaining
> about not being able to use what you provided
> you'll see that it will be you who has to deal
> with the problems.

It does of course depend on your willingness to support Cygwin.  Some
vendors define tiers of support.  For example,
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla_Build_FAQ .  You'll
notice that Cygwin isn't even explicitly stated as a platform.
There's only a reference to "win32/x86 (gcc)", which could mean Cygwin
or MinGW.  In any event it's a Tier-3 platform, something Mozilla
doesn't think is very important.  Mozilla doesn't use CMake.  It may
be strange to a CMake guy not to support every compiler out there, but
with other hand-rolled build systems, people make that choice.
Especially as software gets very large.  I mean, if you're big, and
important, and you've hit MSVC + Linux/GCC + MacOS X, who cares if you
don't do Cygwin?

Chicken builds work fine on Cygwin.
http://chicken.wiki.br/platforms#Windows  John Cowan builds on Cygwin
regularly, so we know about Cygwin problems quickly.  We care about
all the platforms because we're using CMake, we're small guys, we want
as much reach as possible, and it's easy for us to do.  Chicken is
only a 75K LOC project, so it makes sense to support all the
compilers.

That said, we've had a nasty bug with the VC++ 2005 Express compiler
for awhile now that makes it unbuildable.  It's not my fault,
Chicken's Scheme-to-C transformations are just too aggressive for the
wimpy Express compiler.  None of the principal Chicken developers use
this compiler and nobody wants to deal with it.  Meanwhile, would-be
Chicken newbies who use VC++ 2005 Express haven't stepped up to deal
with it either, and they're the ones who actually want the support.
We're open source guys, so I'm far more interested in getting newbies
to share the load than just rushing off to do everything for them.
Maybe the newbies go away or maybe they just use MinGW like I suggest.
 Maybe they pirate a real VC++ compiler.

At any rate, we're clearly guilty of having compiler priorities and
blowing things off, same as the big boys.  Yes VC++ 2005 Express would
expand our audience.  No we're not getting paid enough to drop what
we're doing to go deal with it, try $0.

I see your bug #5238 is about installing .exe's.  We use the Cygwin
VERSION for our Chicken libraries, but not our .exe's.  Works fine for
us.  Kitware implemented this not long after I filed a bug about
Cygwin versioning issues; thanks again Kitware.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every