As mentioned in my previous post, I have decided to migrate Crossbow to CMake.
Crossbow is supposed to support GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Bonus points
for more UNIX-likes. No, I don't think I'll try to make it work on Windows,
that's not my thing.
Compiling it under GNU/Linux was trivial. Ensuring that it works under BSD
systems is the next step, and it simply requires the modification of a
few existing scripts. They automate the installation and the execution a
collection of black-box tests, and they must re-adapted to install a
cmake project.
I started by testing on OpenBSD. I stumbled into a problem that seems to
match some issue I've seen before, while trying to build a different
cmake project on FreeBSD.
I'm using pkg_check_modules to find my dependencies, and while CMake claims
that the dependencies were found, it later fails at supplying the system
path extensions needed to actually compile against them.
I'm not entirely sure if this problem matches the similar one that I mention,
that is what happened on FreeBSD. In that case the fix wasn't really a fix:
I just added the extra paths manually to the CMake target which needed it.
In this case I'm aiming at a better quality, so I'm not interested in a
it-just-works kind of hack. On the other hand I'm clueless. I guess
I will need to delve into this problem.
But not tonight. Tonight I'm only good for sleeping.
It doesn't look like an insurmountable problem: I'm sure that plenty of
projects using CMake have been ported to BSD, and that's exactly where I'm
going to look as first step). Yet, if anyone reading this has a clue, feel
free to reach me (dacav at fastmail dot com).
