Re: Multi-platform build system

[Stefan Monnier]

> Time ago I volunteered to write a CMake [1] build spec for Emacs.  It was
> considered unnecessary by the people who does most of the work on the
> current build systems. I will have some free time (sigh) on the next
> months, so I reiterate the offer in case anyone changed his mind.

I'm not sure I understand the way the discussion is going (at least from
a rational point of view ;-).  So I'll start over from the beginning.

Currently Emacs has 2 build systems: one that is a mix of old-style
ad-hoc config files (predefined per system in src/m and src/s) and
autoconf+make, and another one for Windows builds.

We could use CMake to replace either (or both) of them:
- I don't think only replacing the Windows build systems would be
  a great improvement.
- Getting rid of the duplication between the two build systems would be nice.
- I don't know what would be the benefit of replacing the autoconf
  system: I'd be very happy to get rid of the src/m and src/s config
  files (we've already made significant progress in this direction) but
  I don't think using CMake would magically do that for us.  And it
  would add `cmake' as an additional build-dependency (compared to
  autoconf which is not absolutely needed to build Emacs).

I have no experience with CMake, so it's hard to know whether it would
be a good change or not.  But I would be interested to see what that
would look like.


        Stefan