Re: Switching from Autotools to CMake for core evolution products

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Mon, 2016-10-10 at 12:57 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> I agree about whatever we switch GNOME over to en-masse, but for
> scattered projects, I'm less sure, and I'm particularly less sure
> about
> CMake, where there seems to be a certain lack of uniformity.

Hm yes, that's one of the disadvantages to using CMake, each package
has its own way to decide where to install stuff under the install
prefix. I think all GNOME stuff will be using the GNU directory module,
though, in which case we can rely on -DLIB_INSTALL_DIR to work.
Hopefully we can avoid adding CMake projects to Continuous that don't
respect that variable? The only other variable that Continuous needs to
always set is -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, which fortunately is standard for
all CMake projects.

> Can you propose what the necessary change would be to:
>
>  https://people.gnome.org/~walters/build-api/build-api.md

Well that document is Autotools-specific. It would need to be written
from scratch for CMake following CMake conventions, and separately
again for Meson. None of the document is applicable to CMake or Meson
world. I don't think individual projects should maintain compatibility
glue only needed by Continuous regardless.

Michael