[cmake-developers] Making kwsys a proper library

[Ben Boeckel]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 10:35:58 -0400, David Cole via cmake-developers wrote:
> Honestly, KWSys has always seemed like a boost-avoidance mechanism
> from an outsider's perspective. Perhaps it should be replaced with
> boost equivalents in projects that need to be packaged for Fedora.
> 
> I assume all the boost libraries are already packaged/available.

While I do love me some Boost, it doesn't provide process launching
APIs, so you'd still need to handle that. Plus, Boost's lack of a stable
API/ABI across the large range of versions that would need to be
supported (e.g., there is no Boost release which supports VS7.1 and
VS2015 at the same time, nevermind some of the more obscure compilers
CMake expects to self-host on). And you'd need to both support
filesystem2 and filesystem3 in client code, so it's not just a problem
at the "get boost building" level. IMO, it would be *much* worse since
CMake would have to ship with multiple versions of Boost, each subsetted
and likely patched. That is hardly better.

--Ben