On 2016-05-13 12:58-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> To summarize, your suggestion to move back to an ABBS has fallen on
> somewhat stony soil.  :-) The reason for that is we had a chance to do
> a head-to-head comparison between a new CBBS that had been developed
> for a month or so and an ABBS alternative that had been developed for
> many years, and there was absolutely no contest.  So I would
> encourage you to give CMake a second chance especially now that you
> know about that VERBOSE=1 option.  :-)

More general points concerning PLplot and CMake.  Since 2006, the
open-source (OSI-approved BSD 3-clause License) CMake code that is
written in C++ has attracted a large band of volunteer developers who
are lead by CMake code gurus from KitWare such as Brad King.  As a
result there has been extremely strong development of CMake in the
last decade.

All this development of CMake itself has occurred in a way that was
backwards compatible for the CMake-2 series of releases.  Some
well-publicized backwards incompatiblities (most of which had long
been deprecated) were introduced for CMake-3 which was a substantial
rewrite of CMake-2.  The series of CMake-3 releases has also been
backwards compatible within the series.  So that is a great boon to a
mature project that is not being actively developed because that
project's build system "just works" regardless of CMake-3 version.

That said, the early releases of the CMake-3 had a number of bugs
introduced by that rewrite that had to be flushed out by user testing
so I strongly recommend using the highest version possible of CMake-3
(currently 3.5.2 which works fine for me on Linux).  Also, I continue
to develop the PLplot CBBS to support any new directions that PLplot
development takes and to make our build system easier to maintain.

With regard to that maintainability point, I try to replace use of
CMake features that have become officially deprecated or which are
advertised as problematic in the CMake-3 series with improved CMake-3
logic that has become available.  However, I do that in a conservative
way so that our build system continues to work for CMake-3.0.2.  That
is the minimum CMake version we allow on Linux to support such
distributions as Debian jessie where 3.0.2 is the latest version of
CMake that is available.  (Note, the minimum version of CMake I have
adopted for all non-Linux operating systems is currently 3.3.2, but
that will likely get bumped just as soon as both the Cygwin and
MinGW-w64/MSYS2 distributions provide a binary package for a later
version of CMake.

To summarize, I have pretty much become the "CMake guru" for this
project, but it is not that much of a burden so I feel confident that
when I retire from PLplot someone else will be able to continue
developing our CBBS without many issues with the same motivations as
above (support new PLplot development and improve maintainability of
our CBBS). Or if some keener wants to try some other build system that
does not interfere with our CBBS, I will probably be too invested in
our CBBS to help with development of that additional build system, but
I do intend to follow Rafael's good example, and challenge that person
to "show me the code" since sometimes great things (such as our
present CBBS) happen as a result of such challenges.

Alan

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

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