[sword-devel] CMake for SWORD

[Greg Hellings]

List (attempting to be gender neutral!),

I know I have mentioned in the past that I thought CMake would be a
worthy technology for SWORD to use to help simplify the disparate
number of build systems that we currently use.  Autotools works
exceedingly well in Linux and passably for Mac users, but it has a
drastic shortcoming supporting most any IDE that a developer might
want to use and has, to my knowledge, no support for Microsoft or
Borland products, among others.

I have finally decided to bite the bullet and begin to implement this
build system.  Those of you who have interest and the knowledge in
such things can follow along my development, which is on Launchpad in
the branches for libsword (bzr branch
lp:~greg-hellings/libsword/cmake-port).  Currently the system builds
and installs the library and headers with detection for ZLib, ICU,
CLucene and cURL and allows you to optionally force those to off.
Linking against some ZLib versions fails (missing symbol untargz), but
building with the internal ZLib works.  The main utilities will also
build but not install yet.  I plan to finish expanding the
capabilities to bring it in line with the Autotools system over the
next few days.

I'm doing all of the development under Linux at the moment, since I
find it easiest to lay the framework there.  I will be testing it in
Windows with MSVC and MinGW and also in Mac when I get closer to
completion, but you're welcome to give it a try now if you feel the
desire.  Obviously, I will also make some documentation when the
system matures to give an idea of how it works for those who are
unfamiliar with CMake and who don't want to wade through my code to
find the optional parameters.

Feedback or help are both welcome.

--Greg