[CMake] Submitting patches to rely on external libraries for certain platforms

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Matt Rogers wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 August 2006 19:26, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>   
>> Matt Rogers wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Would the CMake developers be interested in patches that allows people to
>>> use their already installed libraries such as curl, expat, libtar, etc.
>>> on certain platforms and fallback to the in-source libraries if they're
>>> not installed?
>>>       
>
> You misunderstand. *sigh* Apparently, I suck at explaining myself today.. :(
>
>   
>> Anyone can already write this kind of code using FindXXX and FIND_*
>> commands and then some conditionals.  It is not difficult CMake script
>> code to write.  You seem to be saying it should / could be automagical.
>> I'm not convinced that's beneficial, however.  When people include the
>> entire source of a library in their own build tree, it's because they
>> want control over how the thing is built.  For instance, the source code
>> may have diverged from standard distributions, may be older, may be
>> frozen, may be built with CMake instead of Autoconf and be integrated
>> with CTest, etc.  When people don't want that level of control, they
>> implement FindXXX and FIND_* commands.  I doubt you can provide patches
>> that make FindXXX and FIND_* any better than they currently are, so this
>> part of the problem never goes away.  It's code that people have to write.
>>
>>     
>
> No, I'm not saying that it should be automagical. I'm saying that when 
> building CMake, I want to be allowed to use my own versions of curl, expat, 
> libtar, etc. instead of the ones that are shipped as part of the CMake source 
> code. This means that I would write the necessary Find*.cmake files and use 
> the necessary commands in the build to do this. However, before I waste any 
> time on another endeavour that will be rejected by the CMake developers, I 
> wanted to ask if this would be something worthwhile to them.
>   

Ah.  Well, it's a good test of the principle, that buildmasters build 
their own sources their own way for a reason.


> I don't know how bootstrapping CMake works on windows,

I use CMake to build VS .NET 2003 project files, which I then use to 
build CMake.  VS .NET 2003 or similar is necessary because of the 
dependency on MFC.  You can't freely obtain a working MFC.  There's some 
sample weirdo AMD64 crap in the PSDK that some people have hacked to 
make a sort of half-assed MFC, but it is totally unsupported, doesn't 
work, is somewhat sick and wrong given the way Microsoft builds things, etc.


>  which is which i 
> initially proposed that it be unix/linux only. If we can make it work on 
> windows, great, if not, well, then, it'll work for at least one, if not two, 
> of the three supported platforms.
>   

I'll hazard a guess that offering to create special cases for a build is 
not going to be received warmly in the absence of demonstrable value, 
but I could be mistaken.  Anyways, why is using your own libcurl etc. 
important?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

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