r16624 - gnucash/trunk - Remove the spurious m4/ directory. Use macros/ instead.

[Christian Stimming]

Am Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2007 08:28 schrieb Andreas Köhler:
> > >> (Actually, CMake might be an interesting alternative, especially
> > >> because we do
> > >> not use many "convenience libraries" but instead directly build a
> > >> whole bunch
> > >> of shared libraries. 
> > >
> > > I just wanted to tell you that I am working on that now, in case anyone
> > > started as well :-)
> >
> > Quick question..  Does using cmake require cmake to be installed to build
> > from the tarball?  

Yes it does. Andreas is right.

The whole point of cmake is that it will perform all those platform-checks 
(more precisely: host and target checks) which used to be done by the 
autoconf-generated shell scripts which nobody was able to understand. But the 
price for this is that cmake is required to be installed on the host.

> > If you only need cmake in order to build the build system but you do
> > NOT need it to build from the tarball, then that's probably okay.  I
> > think it's okay to add dependencies to build from SVN.  But I'd be
> > extremely hesitant to require a new build dependency to the tarball.

I'm with Andreas here: If we're talking about the 2.4.x timeframe, KDE4 will 
have made it into most distros, which implies cmake will be there as well. 
Also, *building* gnucash is getting a lower and lower priority - people 
expect a pre-built package to be available anyway, and for that of course the 
build tool doesn't matter.

> As projects like KDE are switching to CMake, I do not think
> that GnuCash will add a unique build dependency that nobody will
> maintain in a few years.  I would rather try and see what CMake can help
> us with.  BTW, I think this would remove the dependency on libtool.

Yes, it will make libtool completely go away. Relief! :-)

Christian