Sending on behalf of Frank (mail issues):

Hi Folks,

I have been giving quite a bit of consideration recently to making life easier for setting up new development environments for 3 developer types across all languages (particularly targeting windows as a development platform):

·         Users of OpenMAMA

·         Developers of OpenMAMA bridges

·         OpenMAMA contributors

I found myself getting repeatedly frustrated with the build system. It’s inflexibility makes many things awkward, and I found my options limited because of having to support all of the build systems we have available (particularly handling build directory structures of third party libraries on windows). Today we have scons for linux, scons for windows (yes – they are fairly separate for some reason), and Visual Studio project files for Windows IDE developers so any time you make a change, you really need to consider all 3.

Today in our build infrastructure, we use Scons which is grand, but we already have a lot of things that you have to hack together for scons, but which you actually get out of the box with Cmake like toolchain discovery.

I have started playing with it on a small scale and I think it is a really good fit for OpenMAMA because it:

·         Generates project files for you so you don’t need to check them into source control – they’ll all get generated from the same definition files

·         They have some library discovery mechanisms built in

·         They have install rules that make sense on both linux and windows

·         It can be used to generate .msi installer executables in conjunction with Wix (!)

·         Allows easy integration with external project types (I’m thinking specifically for C# for this one – mono and visual studio both use msbuild)

·         Takes care of DESTDIR and SONAME functionality which has been requested by package-creators in the past (i.e. for rpm / dpkg)

·         Single build system would simplify CI by not requiring changes in both scons and visual studio on windows

·         It has native IDE integration with many platforms and looks like it might even be on its way for Visual Studio

Interestingly, both libevent and qpid proton use cmake, as does almost every other cross-platform C/C++ project that I have stumbled across in the last number of months. With that in mind, I propose that we move our build system to Cmake and end this fun of having to update 3 different built system files every time a new source code file is added.

Any opinions either pro or against are welcome. Also if anyone is key to pitch in with the implementation, please chime in!

Cheers,

Frank

GLENN MCCLEMENTS

SVP Engineering, Europe

gmcclements@...

Adelaide Exchange Building, 2nd Floor, 24-26 Adelaide Street, Belfast, BT2 8GD

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