[fontforge-devel] Build system changes

[T J <jt...@ou...>]

Hi all,

In case I missed highlighting this the previous time around, I will (re)state my intentions:

It is my goal to completely replace the current autotools build system in FontForge with CMake, targeting a minimum version of likely either 3.1 or 3.4.

I have detailed the reasons why here: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/3512

But my aim out of this is primarily:

  *   Significantly improved build times, especially on platforms like Windows
  *   Potentially making it easier to target e.g. MSVC for native Python integration on Windows
  *   Making the build system more maintainable

I don’t exactly know at what point this will land, but I have every intention of making it happen.

CMake >= 3.4 is widely supported on all recent releases of Debian, Ubuntu and RHEL. Windows and MacOS have easy access to the latest version of CMake. For distros where this is not available by default, my take is that either a newer version of CMake just needs to be installed (say via a PPA), or they should use older releases of FontForge.

Thanks,
Jeremy