Re: [Chicken-users] understanding the CMake build

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Thomas Chust wrote:
> I figured out now that the problems so far must have been caused by 
> the fact that I had never installed a statically linked version of 
> CHICKEN from my autotools builds. I now did a clean install of the 
> 2.429 CHICKEN tarball in the default configuration, and magically the 
> linker errors about undefined symbols during the CMake build 
> disappeared. I have actually no clue why this helped, as there should 
> theoretically be no difference in the outputs from chicken and 
> chicken-static, but it did help.

Hrm.  Well, it's true that I canonically build with the Chicken 2.3 MSVC 
binary chicken-static.exe.  I've done no testing of building from 
chicken.exe at all.  I wonder if I should test both or just require 
chicken-static.  I don't really want to double my build times, nor 
support chickens that were bootstrapped in different ways.  Then again, 
it would be worth knowing why things come out differently.  I guess 
first off I'll see if I can reproduce your bad results with dynamic builds.

> After the build through CMake completed cleanly, some strange 
> behaviour remained, though:
>
> 1) The installation script does not complete cleanly beacause it doesn't
>     find a file called ChangeLog in the build directory -- this is 
> probably
>     trivial to fix, and it's trivial to avoid by touching the file.

This should be fixed in Darcs HEAD.  Don't use the .429 tarball for 
CMake builds.  Actually we need to release a .430 tarball if things hold 
up to scrutiny.


> 2) CMake builds chicken-static and csi-static -- but they are both linked
>     against the *dynamic* libraries belonging to the already installed
>     CHICKEN used for bootstrapping. Therefore they don't work at all if
>     called after removing the old bootstrapping compiler.

That's bizarre.  CMakeLists.txt certainly specifies the correct 
libraries to link against.  Could an old *.h file be picked up from 
somewhere, with old paths?  Do you have a personalized build environment 
with a lot of Chicken INCLUDE directives in it or something?  My own 
build environments are fascistly separated from one another.  I hadn't 
thought about bulletproofing against environments that are not quite so 
clean.

If it is not your environment, then I would suspect a CMake bug.  Is 
this on MacOS X? 

> 3) After installing the fresh CHICKEN, rerunning CMake on the darcs 
> source
>     tree, manually setting the EXTANT_CHICKEN cache entry to chicken
>     instead of the broken chicken-static and running make once more on 
> the
>     build tree, chicken-static and csi-static are regenerated and now 
> work,
>     but they are still dynamically linked.

Kinda baffling.  I'm not supposed to have to specify that an .exe is 
SHARED or STATIC.  Should be a result of the libraries it's linked 
with.  So, the wrong libraries are linked. Hmm.

> And it's simply sad, that VTK, which is produced by the same company 
> as CMake doesn't manage to get built flawlessly using CMake :-(

Well, we haven't ruled out unhealth in your own environment.

> > CMake is a C/C++ oriented build tool.  Java support is pretty recent 
> > and I wouldn't expect much from CMake at all.  I think it's good that 
> > CMake wants to expand its horizons to other languages, but the 
> > reality is Java is well served by Ant. [...]
>
> In my opinion support for Java and other scripting languages is very 
> important in case you want to generate wrappers together with your 
> C/C++ libraries!

So where's the Java support in Chicken.  ;-)  It's not a Java-oriented 
project.  Bigloo Scheme is, and Kawa Scheme totally is.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every