From: Srinivas JONNALAGADDA <srinivas.j@...>
Date: 2006-07-22T17:57:36+09:00
Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005?

On Sat, 2006-07-22 at 15:18 +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> The issue is most visible on Windows right now because of the
> proliferation of compilers available (gcc has strangled most others on
> other platforms), but the reality is that the Ruby toolchain needs to
> be built better and more cross-platform. No one so far has stepped up
> to do that, and I will *freely* state that I'm not qualified to do it.
> Someone needs to make extconf.rb and other tools much more
> platform-neutral so that we aren't bitten by people putting
> compiler/platform-specific CFLAGS in their extconf.rb.

I have recently started looking at the possibility of converting one of
my cross-platform projects (MSVC >= 6 on Win2K, WinXP, and g++ >= 3.4 on
Red Hat/SuSE Linux) from its current build system to CMake
(http://www.cmake.org).

The current build system is (mostly) automated using a set of Python
scripts. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain it.
My initial attempts at migrating a couple of sub-projects have been
successful. Indeed, the resulting CMakeLists.txt files are far simpler!

KDE project has switched recently to CMake from the auto-tools chain
(http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/).

I do not yet know how extconf.rb really works, but could an underlying
CMake make the job of extconf.rb easier?

JS