[sldev] CMakePorts

[Philip Lowman]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:28 AM, Rob Lanphier <robla at lindenlab.com> wrote:

> Hi Philip,
>
> I've assumed what you're envisioning is a sort of Gentoo emerge/FreeBSD
> ports type system (hence the name "ports") for Windows , layered on top
> of CMake, such that there's a standard set of build commands and
> dependency resolution system.
>
> Do I have the ultimate vision roughly right?  It sounds like a bit of a
> stretch from the core purpose of CMake, but not a wild stretch.


That may have been the inspiration for the idea by others, but I think it's
highly doubtful CMakePorts will evolve into the "holy-grail" solution for
installing open-source software on Windows.

The reason why is our focus is on libraries, not applications.  As C++
becomes used in more and more open-source libraries and the number of
compilers grows more and more on Windows, I think it would become harder and
harder to maintain a ports system in the Gentoo/FreeBSD fashion.

At the moment KDE-Windows is probably a much better candidate for an
"application" ports system.  We'll be working with them to ensure that there
is no wasted effort in terms of adding CMake scripts for open-source library
projects, though.

Ultimately I think the two use cases for CMakePorts will be allowing
developers to say: "OK, I want a [32 | 64bit] MSVC [7.0 | 7.1 | 8.0 | 9.0]
/M[TD] Debug & Release build of all of these libraries, make install here,
thank you very much, I'll take things from here"... or.. "OK I want to build
libcurl, libfreetype, and libpng within my project (and please make install
the DLLs by-the-way)"

I could be entirely wrong about this though, we'll just have to see how
things progress.

-- 
Philip Lowman
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/attachments/20090306/7df4bd42/attachment-0001.htm