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

[Derek Atkins]

Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> writes:

> 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.

What do you mean by "nobody was able to understand"?  The configure
script is mostly Shell script with a bunch of m4 convenience macros to
implement pieces of shell script over and over.

>> > 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, cmake is available on Fedora, but it isn't installed by
default.  On the other hand, the auto tools ARE installed by default.
Granted it's not too hard to "yum install cmake", along with all
the other dependencies.

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

I suppose making libtool go away might be good.  But I find
that libtool seems to get the job done.

Is cmake going to make the build system faster?  Easier to
understand?  Easier to maintain?  Is there really a problem
with the current build system that we're trying to fix and
cmake can fix it?

What's the motivation for migrating?

> Christian

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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