One danger I'd like to avoid is all of the Windows people *not* using the autotools build as then we lose testing and further updates on that platform.
That danger is very real :-) I would definitely prefer CMake over autotools.

but in general I find autotools to be the easiest to use for (non-Windows) end users

Actually, I think CMake is quite user friendly, especially in combination with cmake-gui, where you have all options in a simple table that you can edit. And configuration usually takes 1 second and not ~1 Minute like ./configure on MinGW...

My personal opinion is that CMake is currently the better choice for cross-platform apps. Autotools wasn't made for Windows and it shows...

That being said, I think the current Pd build system is good enough (and big thanks to Dan for setting it up!), but I'd still like to experiment with CMake to see what benefits it could bring in term of speed, maintainance and convenience.

BTW, I noticed that portaudio now also offers a CMake build system, besides their original autotools build system :-)

Christof

On 22.04.2020 15:51, Dan Wilcox wrote:
The libpd CMakeLists.txt might be a good starting point.

I have used CMake for some specific things, but in general I find autotools to be the easiest to use for (non-Windows) end users, especially those on Linux that are more used to the paradigm. It's always a beast to set up, but stays stable for a long time.

One danger I'd like to avoid is all of the Windows people *not* using the autotools build as then we lose testing and further updates on that platform. Keep in mind that the autotools build is now used for Miller's "canonical" releases.

On Apr 22, 2020, at 2:31 PM, pd-dev-request@lists.iem.at wrote:

There has been interest for using CMake for libpd, so I could see 
that as a companion method to build Pd but not a replacement for 
autotools IMO.

Actually, I would volunteer to setup a CMake build system for Pd. CMake 
is really nice because it supports so many tool chains out of the box, 
including Visual Studio solutions and Unix Makefiles for MinGW.

Of course, this is not high priority, so I might give it a shot in 
summer or so.

Christof

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com




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