[cfe-dev] Raising CMake minimum version to 3.4.3

[Renato Golin via cfe-dev]

On 27 April 2016 at 13:31, Florent Castelli <florent.castelli at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don’t think anyone is really stuck to any old version though:

This is a limited picture that we have addressed on previous similar
threads about CMake. Please search the archives for CMake, Ninja and
"versions" to see the whole context.

Now, to your points...

Not everyone has the ability to pick and choose whatever they want.
Also, local development is different than buildbot deployment, and we
do have a lot of obscure targets with obscure operating systems.

Most CMake development has been done on a selective way so far, and
it's working well. IFF you have CMake X.Y.Z, enable this feature. IFF
you have Ninja 1.5.X, enable that one. This is the best way to go for
now.


> CMake itself is released and packaged by CMake. You can download binaries
> from their website for major platforms.
> And it doesn’t have to be a DEB or RPM package, it’s a portable tar.gz file
> that can be unpacked with statically linked
> binaries. You don’t even need to be root to use it and it could even be
> automated for most platforms using some build
> scripts that fetch the dependencies.

You're assuming everyone can just install whatever they want on their
company servers...


> For the other platforms, you could build it from source, which is really
> easy. Newer versions of CMake still support some
> really ancient platforms, so I don’t think anyone will have issues doing
> that. If you’re using an exotic platform, you should
> be used to compiling your own software anyway, so I don’t think this will be
> an issue for them.

You're assuming it's easy to compile based on your experience, but
have you tested cross-compiling it to old distributions?


> Do Windows devs get stuck because the Windows packaging system doesn’t come
> with the latest version of CMake?
> They don’t have any, so they download the installer, use the updated version
> and don’t complain (too) much.

Is this an argument that Linux users shouldn't be worried about binary
installers just because Windows users do that all the time? Because if
it is, it doesn't hold water.

cheers,
--renato