clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 14.11.2013 11:01, schrieb ideasman42:
>
> >> I do not know if the Windows part is happy with the MSVC projects (or
> >> whatever they now named the IDE). But the official one has graphical
> >> interface not available in unix, so factoring on makefile seems futile.
> >
> > Done well, CMake can be used to generate MSVC project files to save you the
> > hassle of maintaining them and committing them into your source.
>
> While that may well be true, and is probably a big benefit for projects
> that have their origins outside the Windows world, it may actually be
> counter-productive in a project like POV-Ray where MSVC happens to be
> the primary development environment, and where the primary developers
> don't have much CMake experience themselves. I see a risk here that it
> would create a dependency on external expertise, which in a hobbyist
> project cannot be guaranteed to persist.

Point taken, I cant argue with this - on the other hand there is no need to drop
MSVC project files instantly either until you are OK with the CMake generated
ones (or never if you prefer not to use them).
The advantage with them is you can easily support many MSVC versions at once,
which IIRC isnt totally simple otherwise, but I dont use msvc.

> Now if a CMake setup would be started by someone with enough personal
> motivation to carry it through its infancy and push it to a high level
> of quality, switching over to CMake as the primary build system might at
> some time become a viable and productive option; it's not like
> maintaining native MSVC project files is a perfect solution. But if this
> would be your only reason to set up a CMake system, then don't do it.

Yep gradual migration is fine, for blender at one point we have ~5 or so
buildsystems, it was horrible.
- scons
- hand written makefiles
- cmake
- msvc (2 versions)
- autoconf/automake (not sure it ever worked well)

We managed to remove hand written makefiles and MSVC project files and replace
with CMake.


As for weather I would maintain this - well yes, but once its written (and some
developers use it) I expect it wouldnt be the only person having to maintain
anyway-  others notice if it breaks and fix things too, unless you start adding
code new generators and new languages - I expect maintaining would be very
little effort.

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