[cmake-developers] Ninja windows

[Bill Hoffman]

On 3/6/2012 12:17 PM, Peter Collingbourne wrote:

> The Ninja generator is disabled on Windows as it still doesn't yet
> work correctly with Ninja's master branch.  It works to some degree
> with someone else's branch, but one of the required features on that
> branch (response file support) was recently merged into Ninja master,
> so hopefully someone on Windows will be able to add the necessary
> support to CMake soon.  I would hold off on setting up a dashboard
> for Windows until we can at least build CMake with Ninja master.
>

I am a bit confused.   What are the features on someone else's branch 
that the CMake generator needs?

What will it take to get this:

 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmakescript/files/cmake-2.8.7.20120202-Ninja.exe 


into the CMake source tree?


I would be OK, with a non-standard ninja as long as those patches are 
eventually going to be in ninja.  I don't like having ninja windows 
cmake support outside of the main cmake dev tree.  Could we do this:

1. integrate cmake windows ninja support into next
2. run a dashboard that uses a given ninja binary?

My goal would be to make sure cmake windows ninja keeps building and 
working and other ninja work does not break the existing cmake windows 
support.

> I have been asking Windows developers to enable the generator locally
> for their own development by commenting out the IF(NOT WIN32) block.
> Perhaps once we set up Windows dashboards it would be better to
> introduce an internal variable (CMAKE_USE_NINJA?) which can be used
> to enable this generator on Windows, and have the dashboards use it.
>
I would rather have it on by default and print some warning if it finds 
the "wrong" ninja, one that does not have the required patches.

-Bill