Re: [Boost-build] Future development

From: Bill Hoffman (bill.hoffman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-07 09:46:05

Vladimir Prus wrote:
>
>> why it makes any difference as long as other people with
>> plenty of support resources are responsible for those 2.5M.  We give
>> away responsibility for maintaining 1.5M and take responsibility for
>> 8000 lines of actual code written by Doug, most of which is comments.
>>     
>
> Do you happen to know that KDE folks had to actually modify CMake? So
> at one point you could not build KDE by any released version of CMake?
> Repeat: KDE folks, not CMake developers.
OK, that is half true...  The CMake developers did add a bunch of 
feature for KDE,
and for some period of time, KDE could not use a standard release of 
CMake. 
However, I created interim releases and binaries for the KDE folks 
during this time.
There was no major CMake development done by KDE folks during that time,
all c++ modifications to CMake were done by Kitware people.  There were 
minor
bug fixes and suggestions which were integrated into CMake, which I 
would think
was a good thing.   One of the reasons that KDE dropped scons was that 
the upstream
scons developers did not accept much code from the KDE folks, and KDE had to
branch scons.  Kitware invested quite a bit of time making sure CMake 
was up to
the job for KDE, and we worked hard to make sure the transition went as 
smooth
as possible.  

On the other hand, most of the features we added for KDE are what made 
it possible
for Doug to create the CMake build for boost.  Boost can build with 
standard
CMake releases right now. I am sure there are additional features that 
will be added to
CMake to support Boost, as you folks have some different requirements,
and CMake will benefit from those additions just like it did from the 
KDE requests.  
In summary, I think CMake is much more advanced today, than when
 KDE starting using it, so I would not expect boost to require a 
non-official CMake release
as happened with KDE.  If that should happen, I would create binaries 
just like I did for KDE.

-Bill