[cmake-developers] A policy for Policies

[David Cole]

So, when you're saying:

"...but still supporting the OLD stuff with a warning if no one tried
explicitly to set things to use OLD, they just had a working build
system."

You're effectively saying we will never remove the OLD behavior for
any policies, ever?

If that's the case, then why bother even having policies?





On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com> wrote:
> On 6/10/2015 4:57 PM, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
>>
>> If the conclusion would be a policy is removed after 5 years, it's
>> deadline
>> could even be part of the error/warning message right from the point when
>> it
>> is introduced ("you are relying on CMP1234 OLD behaviour. This will be
>> removed
>> June 2020.").
>>
>> Then I could (at work) ignore this maybe until 2017 or 2018, and then it
>> would
>> slowly rise in my priority, and at some point I would fix it in some spare
>> time.
>
> I guess what we want to do is to come up with a system where the "fix" is
> not to just add OLD.   We want to be able to build old releases of projects
> and not break them.  However, if we change something that requires changes
> in the CMakeLists.txt we don't want the developers to just set to OLD, we
> want them to fix it.  If someone goes to the trouble of editing the
> CMakeLists.txt, they should just do the fix not set to OLD to shut up the
> warning.
>
> There is also a whole bunch of users of CMake that have never written a
> single line of CMake code.  They just build software and follow
> instructions.  We want to try real hard to make things work for them and not
> to have a version of CMake nightmare for them.
>
> So, erroring on OLD earlier might work, but still supporting the OLD stuff
> with a warning if no one tried explicitly to set things to use OLD, they
> just had a working build system.
>
> -Bill
>
>
> --
>
> Powered by www.kitware.com
>
> Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at:
> http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ
>
> Kitware offers various services to support the CMake community. For more
> information on each offering, please visit:
>
> CMake Support: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/support.html
> CMake Consulting: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/consulting.html
> CMake Training Courses: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/training.html
>
> Visit other Kitware open-source projects at
> http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html
>
> Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe:
> http://public.kitware.com/mailman/listinfo/cmake-developers