[cairo] Alternatives to autotools-based build systems

[Mike Shaver]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 5:08 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> wrote:
>  > 11) The build system isn't deemed adequate by many win32 developers,
>  >     many of whom end up hand-coding something.
>  >
>  > For #11, we've currently got Makefile.win32 files in the tree, so
>  > we're at least helping a little bit there, (but I imagine there's
>  > still manual effort for these people). And many win32 developers seem
>  > to prefer to have some sort of "project file" solution for their IDE,
>  > (which ends up not being practical to ship with cairo itself), so
>  > perhaps even switching to cmake wouldn't help them.

cmake can produce MSVC project files, I believe, which is one of its
major selling points.  (With a project file, you can get MSVC to build
_much_ faster, since it doesn't have to invoke the compiler from
scratch every time -- the Mozilla Windows build spends a lot of time
in process spawning, sadly.)

>  > [*] http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
>  >
>  >       Decide on a new Distributed Version Control System (This is
>  >       not about switching, just deciding and understanding
>  >       implications)
>  >
>  > That's for the future GNOME 2.24, (within 6 months or so).
>
>  It's so much harder in GNOME.  Even the SVN conversion was quite hard.
>  You have a huge repo with 10 years of history and so many weird
>  surgeries done, it's just not easy.

Indeed, we shattered many a VCS-migration tool on the rocks of
cvs.mozilla.org before we got everything in hg.  Once you're in
anything-but-CVS, though, future migrations become orders of magnitude
easier, so the Next Change for GNOME will likely be easier now that
they're on SVN.

Mike