[sldev] Heads up - we're working on CMake

Bryan O'Sullivan bos at lindenlab.com
Wed Nov 28 12:49:24 PST 2007


Hi, all -

There have been various rattlings and rumblings on sldev over the past 
several months about switching over to CMake for builds, and I got a 
start on it a few weeks ago.  As a proof of concept, we have internal 
builds of the Linux and Windows viewer and servers running with CMake, 
with a Mac build underway.

If you're not familiar with CMake, it's a meta-build system.  It 
generates build instructions for your preferred build environment.  For 
example, on Linux it can produce GNU Makefiles or KDevelop projects.  On 
OS X, it can produce GNU Makefiles or XCode project files.  And on 
Windows, it can speak nmake and a few Visual Studio dialects.

We've loaded the project files into VS2005 and XCode, and they appear to 
work quite nicely so far.  And from my perspective, a win on Linux is 
that I can now run "make" in a subdirectory to ensure that a single 
library builds, instead of having to wait for SConstruct to grind 
through an entire build.

The nice thing about this is that there's just one authoritative source 
of build truth, instead of a scattering of hand-maintained build 
instructions for different platforms.

As far as benefits to the OSS community go, the pain people have had 
with keeping VS2005 projects up to date with our VS2003 bits should 
simply evaporate.  I also hope that people who maintain alternative 
viewer builds will have an easier time making cross-platform changes.

We're not fully committed to switching over to CMake yet, so please 
don't ask me for availability dates.  That said, I'm happy with the 
progress we've been making so far, so I think this is very likely to 
remain the direction we will pursue.

I'll keep you all posted as we have more progress to report.

	<b


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