[cmake-developers] Regression in language support infrastructure for CMake 2.8.10-rc3

Alan W. Irwin irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca
Tue Oct 30 16:20:33 EDT 2012


On 2012-10-30 14:17-0400 Bill Hoffman wrote:

> On 10/30/2012 2:06 PM, Brad King wrote:
>>> >Basically what you are saying is "it's our current policy", and it
>>> >sounds like your group has made the decision about what that current
>>> >policy is going to be.  Nevertheless, I still think you should
>>> >advertise this limitation on your backwards compatibility further.
>>> >"It's not covered" is not enough.  You should also have a big fat
>>> >warning in Modules/CMakeAddNewLanguage.txt about this current policy.
> The intention always was that new language support would be donated upstream 
> and become part of CMake.  This would of course require testing and cross 
> platform support for the language.  However, that was always the expectation.

I cannot speak for D since that is mostly the effort of another group,
but certainly in the case of Ada I would love to donate that language
support upstream including my simple "Hello World" test case that
tests the ability to build an Ada library and an Ada example that
depends on that library. I have certainly made that offer before, and
I do so again now.

>From my perspective the real issue is I don't have the skill set to do
much more for Ada language support than what has already been done for other
languages.  So with help (mostly indirectly through Brad's commit
message and looking over the changes in some of the other language
support files) I was able to adapt Ada language support (and also D)
to the recent language infrastructure compatibility breakage. However,
I didn't have the skills to adjust to more serious language support
infrastructure compatibility breakage in the past, and for that case
Brad had to help me directly with Ada language support.

He probably doesn't even remember that incident from years ago, but
that help was very much appreciated at the time and in retrospect.
However, to prevent the need for such help for external Ada language
support ever being required again, it would be a much better situation
all around if that Ada language support was just part of upstream
CMake.  CMake does have excellent facilities for free software
developers to help with its development.  So I would be willing to
help maintain Ada language support within CMake that way to the best
of my ability, but with the warning that (as in the past due to the
level of my skills) I am unlikely to be able to do all that
maintenance myself.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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