Re: CMake builds :)

[arnold]

Hi.

I personally don't like CMake, for a number of reasons.

However, I would likely allow restoring CMake support to the distribution,
IFF:

1. You are willing to continue to maintain it for the long term.
2. It allows building a working gawk with Visual Studio. Right now
   I have no VS support.

You would need to do paperwork assigning ownership of your changes
to the FSF before I could incorporate them.

Otherwise, I can at least note your GitHub in the manual.

We can continue the discussion privately, if you like.

Thanks,

Arnold

Kuba Sunderland-Ober via "Bug reports only for gawk." <bug-gawk@gnu.org> wrote:

> In NEWS from 2021, there is
> "The CMake infrastructure has been removed. In the five years it was in
> the tree, nobody used it, and it was not updated.".
>
> >  nobody used it
>
> Ahem :) I would have used it if I had read those NEWS before writing a new
> CMakeFile for gawk 5.3.0 :)
>
> There are various projects that need gawk to generate source files - gcc is
> one of them. Building those under Windows is easy if gawk and a couple
> other tools like flex and bison are included in the build, and are built
> with cmake.
>
> Most gnu tools are so small that compiling them takes very little time,
> so this is very much feasible. The typical use case is building complete
> software packages, with build-time dependencies, using MS Visual Studio.
>
> In particular, I've ported sdcc's build system to cmake, and it uses
> winflexbison's "native" cmake build script, gcc's preprocessor (I wrote
> cmake support for it), and gawk (yep, wrote CMakeLists for that too).
> 
> Unfortunately, since autotools-based builds seem to have to remain
> in perpetuity, it's unlikely that re-adding this would be considered
> productive?
> 
> I've now found a 5.1.0 fork at https://github.com/mbuilov/gawk-windows
> that also includes lots of other changes, and I don't care much for those.
> 
> I will push my work to github - it's minimal but good enough to target
> Windows using gawk and mingw.
>
> Cheers, Kuba