Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] building with cmake

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 09/15/2015 08:40 PM, Robert Durkacz wrote:
> Marcus Leech writes "When a project blooms in portability, size,
> dependencies, and "reach", the use of a meta-make scheme of some sort
> actually makes those kinds of project practical."
>
> Certainly gnuradio is not too large a project to maintain by the make
> utility. I hope Marcus will confirm that for the benefit of people who
> never use make directly. It is for reasons of portability that you
> need a 'meta-make', right? A meta-make is something that generates a
> make system or ideally might translate one from one environment to
> another. If I follow Marcus, a meta-make should leave a decent make
> system behind and you do not expect it to leave lots of traces of
> itself behind like cmake does.
>
> I hope to spend some time on gnuradio and the next thing I will do is
> put a simple build system in place for my own use. I don't see a
> problem. SDR is the main aim but I am interested in cooperating with
> anyone who wants to get the most out of make.
You can put "system dependencies goo" inside every Makefile you author, 
but my experience is that exercise becomes
  "stand on your head while rubbing your tummy counterclockwise"-ish 
pretty quickly.

With meta-make systems, the Makefiles are interstitial artifacts, like 
.o files an the like.

The danger with "rolling your own build system for Gnu Radio" that 
*doesn't* include all the CMake stuff, is that you'll fall out of step
  fairly quickly, and the maint exercise of converting the way Gnu 
Radio builds itself to your own purely-Make based scheme will
  become burdensome.

I'm about as olde-skool as they come in this community, and even I could 
see the benefit of migrating from a meta-make scheme
  like autotools, to CMake, and CMake is more portable--one of the 
desires of the CMake migration was to make Windows builds
  easier, but there hasn't been much "steam" in that direction, in 
practice.....