[llvm-dev] RFC: Updating to CMake 3.15.0

Tue Oct 29 11:00:12 PDT 2019

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 8:40 PM David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 10:28 AM Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>> +1 to bumping cmake version and cleaning build system somewhat.
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 8:23 PM Tom Stellard via llvm-dev
>> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 10/29/2019 10:10 AM, Chris Bieneman via llvm-dev wrote:
>> > > At the LLVM Developer Meeting on October 23rd we held a CMake roundtable. One of the items we discussed was adopting a more regular timeline for CMake upgrades. During the roundtable there was overwhelming support for upgrading CMake, and support for treating CMake differently than how we treat upgrading host compilers.
>> > >
>> > > Historically we've taken into account recent versions of Visual Studio, Xcode and Linux distribution long term support packages when deciding what CMake version to require. While this does work, it has held us to old versions of CMake for long periods of time.
>> > >
>> > > During the roundtable we discussed that the amount of effort involved in updating to a modern CMake is more or less the same regardless of what version we choose. We believe this to be true because most OS package managers have older versions, like the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which has CMake 3.10.2 which was released January 18, 2018. Additionally CMake.org provides binary and source downloads, and building CMake from source has lower system requirements than LLVM and is very simple.
>> > >
>> > > With all of this in mind at the roundtable we decided to propose raising the minimum required CMake version for all LLVM sub-projects to 3.15.0. Assuming there are no objections to this proposal, I propose a cut-over date of December 2, 2019.
>> > >
>> >
>> > Will users of the CMake export files generated by LLVM also need to use 3.15.0 or
>> > is it possibly to have the export files require an older version?
>> >
>> > The 10.0 branchpoint will be in early January, I think it would be better
>> > to wait until after the branch.  Mainly because that doesn't give us a
>> > lot of time to actually take advantage of the new features  in 3.15.0 before the
>> > branch, so I don't see much benefit in switching over at that date.
>> >
>> > I think we should also decide on a long-term plan for CMake requirements.
>> > If the conclusion is that users should be able to handle using the latest
>> > (3.15.0) version of CMake, maybe we should just plan to always up-date to the
>> > latest version in trunk after each release branch is created.
>> Would it please be possible to have some reasonably sane
>> dependency versioning policy?
>
>
> I'm not sure "sane" captures the nuance of your position - only suggests that
> Tom's suggestion of upgrading to the latest release is "insane"?
The "insane" word is not in my mail.
I'm only saying it will be good to document the actual versioning policy,
and it will be great if it's not "just manually download XYZ and use it".

> What is it you'd like to avoid or that you find important/valuable about a one year old
> version of CMake, for instance? It means users have to update their CMake
> as frequently (since it doesn't skip versions) - but allows some users to get this
> based on their distributions release, rather than having to do it manually/explicitly?
Extremely precisely, yes.

If you require The freshest version of something, it is all but guaranteed to
be not packaged in distributions, so basically *everyone* will have to
work around the packaging system. If the version is //somewhat// aged,
then it is not unreasonable to expect for it to be present in
//some// proper packaged form in //most// distros.

All that of course does not apply to platforms with no native packaging
system (windows?).

The exact definition of "aged" will not be precisely definable though,
I would guess 1 year is somewhat around what could be considered middle-ground.

>> Even debian sid only has 3.13.4-1.
>> How about accepting/requiring version which is at least 1 year old?
>> That would incidentally, result in requiring cmake v3.13
>>
>> > -Tom
Roman

>> > > Thanks,
>> > > -Chris
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>> > >
>> >
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