[poppler] RFC: Dropping autotools

[Albert Astals Cid]

El divendres, 18 d’agost de 2017, a les 16:02:10 CEST, Jan-Erik S va escriure:
> On fre, 2017-08-18 at 00:13 +0200, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > Ok, this is going to be controversial (or maybe not).
> > 
> > I'd like to drop autotools and just use cmake as build system.
> > 
> > Reasons:
> >  * I don't use autotools so whenever something new happens i regularly
> >  forget> 
> > to try it works there (as proven last time with the nss includes)
> > 
> >  * cmake is more portable (i.e. doesn't uses shell scripts)
> >  * cmake gets releases more often
> >  * cmake code is easier to read (for me)
> >  * AFAICS Not even gnome (which was the "last" big autotools user) plans
> >  to
> > 
> > use autotools anymore
> > 
> > Only issues:
> >  * We don't have gtk-doc support
> >  * We don't have make dist-xz support (which i use for releases)
> > 
> > But i'm sure both should be fairly easy to add, just never cared to do it
> > since the only times i use them are for releases.
> > 
> > Comments?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> >   Albert
> 
> I agree with the general idea, but I see at least one more (potential)
> issue: what cmake version the major distributions support.

We currently require 3.1 that is basically available everywhere but on CentOS 
according to https://repology.org/metapackage/cmake/badges 

If you're on CentOS well, you're using old stuff already but if you really 
want to compile poppler, 
https://cmake.org/files/v3.9/cmake-3.9.1-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz is just a click 
away and gives you a precompiled cmake.

So personally i don't think this is an issue.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> I would suggest delaying this until all (or most) major distributions
> have, or at least are planning to support, a sufficiently capable cmake
> version in their latest long term support version (if they have them) or
> latest stable version otherwise.
> 
> Regards, Jan-Erik
> 
> 
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