[CMake] Bootstrapping CMake

[Frerich Raabe]

Hi,

one of the projects I'm working on requires that the build system can be bootstrapped, i.e. when unpacking a source tarball you run 'configure' which is actually a shell script which first runs 'make' to build the actual (proprietary) build tool - which has no dependencies other than a C++ compiler and a C++ library - and then it runs the build tool. So even though our software has a significant number of external dependencies (the Qt libraries, for instance), the build tool itself is shipped with the sources, and it builds on a wide range of platforms. Whether this design is sensible or not is a different discussion, I'd rather not get dragged into discussing that. :-)

I considered porting this project to CMake, and one of the issues which came up is that it requires customers to install CMake to build from sources - and CMake may (or may not?) be available on all the platforms we would like to support. So the question came up: is it feasible (and legally possible, as far as the license goes) to ship a (subset?) of CMake so that we can build CMake ourselves? Did anybody do this already?

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing