[Flightgear-devel] Cmake

[James T. <zak...@ma...>]

Hello everybody,

Following some discussion at LinuxTag, and since, there is a rough consensus from the active C++ developers, to switch the FlightGear build system to Cmake (instead of automake / custom VisualStudio projects). To avoid having multiple build systems maintained in parallel, and code contributors feeling obliged to keep them all working, the plan is to actively remove automake and VisualStudio projects from the tree, so that everyone is using the same build system.

Cmake isn't a perfect build system - but having a single build system that works everywhere, is more valuable than having several 'perfect' solutions that all need to be kept in sync.

(Of course, CMake can generate Makefiles, Visual Studio projects, XCode projects, Eclipse and Code::Blocks projects)

The plan is to drop automake and Visual Studio support around October 17th, so between now and then we need to fix any missing cases in the CMake support, eg lesser used platforms such as FreeBSD & Cygwin+gcc, and ensure any obscure configure options also exist in the CMake world. 

(Updating the build instructions documentation on the wiki, and scripts to refer to cmake would also be good!)

If you regularly pull+build 'next', please try a cmake based build, and report any issues you encounter - CMake should work 'out of the box' on Mac (Makefiles or XCode), Linux (32- and 64- bit) and Windows (VisualStudio  2008 and 2010 -  mingw and cygwin may need some fixes).

CMake's packaging tool, CPack, also adds the possibility of automatic .deb and .srpm creation - I've done some limited work on support this, but if anyone on Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu wished to move this forward, it should be relatively easy to get working.

Regards,
James