PROPOSAL: Use Cmake as the build system for Samba

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 10:53 +0300, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> I heard more than once that Jelmer was (re)working on a build system for 
> samba.
> 
> Did anyone has more clues on what's going on ?  How much will it share 
> with the current build system ?
My work is an incremental improvement to the current build system in
  Samba 4. It can land pretty soon, but I'm happy to see it being
 discarded if we decide to switch to something else.

Cheers,

Jelmer

> On 17/02/2010 22:39, simo wrote:
> > To all people involved in samba development,
> >
> > as the subject shows I am writing this mail to propose a change in our
> > building system.
> >
> > == Why ? ==
> >
> > During the years we tried a few times to get a better build system,
> > mainly for the Samba 4 effort, but since the Franky project this
> > involves also the Samba 3 code base. This effort has been commendable
> > but many recognize that what we have now is far from ideal.
> >
> > The current system seem way to complex (it requires knowledge of 3/4
> > different languages strangely intertwined) to be easily understood and
> > is basically almost completely undocumented. And most of it is obscure
> > to most developers and only a few key ones have enough knowledge of the
> > system to resolve any non-trivial problem. This causes issues not only
> > within the development team but is also perceived as an issue by anyone
> > that has to work with it. Distribution maintainers, for example, have a
> > hard time grokking it and can't easily touch if they have some problem
> > to solve.
> >
> > == What ? ==
> >
> > I have been working with Andreas and Günther on investigating the use of
> > Cmake within Samba. Cmake seem to be powerful enough to address the
> > needs that initially caused us to build this homegrown system.
> >
> > Andreas created a page that explains all the advantages using Cmake
> > could bring us: http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/CMake
> >
> > Andreas also converted a few basic components to Cmake to show how this
> > conversion will work.
> >
> > One of the most interesting things about Cmake, is that for the initial
> > steps it can be developed in a completely parallel way to the current
> > build system, so that the transition should not cause extended building
> > problems while it is carried over.
> >
> > Andreas is very well versed in Cmake, he even contributes to the
> > upstream community, and he would like to volunteer driving the initial
> > adoption and helping any developer that wants to get involved get up to
> > speed with it.
> >    
> 

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