[Insight-developers] RE: [VTK-developers] CMake 0.94 released

[Ken Martin]

I thought this through some and I think Debug makes sense as the
default for a couple reasons.

1) This is windows. If someone wants to just run the software they
will have downloaded a binary. (which hopefully will be compiled with
a fast compiler, not Microsoft, Release on Microsoft is not that good)
Most people who actually compile the software are doing it because
they want to extend it etc. In that case Debug is used most
frequently.

2) For people on windows who are working with the source code and may
be less familiar with it I'd rather the default be Debug so that we
can help them resolve issues with a stack trace. We have run into this
already a few times where people build VTK in the default setting for
some development work. It crashes and then when we talk to them they
have no stack trace, so we have to tell them to switch to Debug,
rebuild everything and call us back. I think this is more frustrating
for new users than having slower performance for their first build.

3) A minor issue, but I don't really trust the Microsoft optimizer
half as far as I can throw it. We have run into serious bugs in the
optimized builds under MSVC5 and maybe they are all fixed now, but I
still worry.

I think on UNIX, where precompiled binaries are less common, there is
a stronger argument for the default to be -O2. I don't recall what it
is right now other than -g -O2 for gcc. All the same I'm open to other
issues.

Thanks
Ken