Update BUILDING.md to Include Content about Maintaining the Build System

[gerickson]

No description provided.

[woody-apple]

Thanks for the installation instructions. You're on fire @gerickson :)

[woody-apple]

@hawk248 ?

[hawk248]

Including cmake as an option would be beneficial .. can it be added as another option ?

[gerickson]

Including cmake as an option would be beneficial .. can it be added as another option ?

Someone will need to invest the effort to make an equivalent level of functionality. What's the key benefit from your perspective, given that would imply potentially maintaining two parallel build systems?

[jelderton]

Including cmake as an option would be beneficial .. can it be added as another option ?

Someone will need to invest the effort to make an equivalent level of functionality. What's the key benefit from your perspective, given that would imply potentially maintaining two parallel build systems?

This came up a while back, but cmake has a lot of benefits:

• transitive dependency mgmt
• works on a large variety of platforms
• allows inclusion and patching of 3rdParty
• most modern IDEs support it natively
• easy to maintain

[gerickson]

Including cmake as an option would be beneficial .. can it be added as another option ?

Someone will need to invest the effort to make an equivalent level of functionality. What's the key benefit from your perspective, given that would imply potentially maintaining two parallel build systems?

This came up a while back, but cmake has a lot of benefits:

• transitive dependency mgmt
• works on a large variety of platforms
• allows inclusion and patching of 3rdParty
• most modern IDEs support it natively
• easy to maintain

Of the above, I think the autotools-based system we have checks all of the above boxes aside from 'allows inclusion and patching of 3rdParty' and, possibly, 'most modern IDEs support it natively'. As for the 'easy to maintain', I've personally found that debatable.

At the end of the day, I've no particular religion here so long as the project:

• Maintains a singular build system.
• That build system is turnkey and templated with no custom work required by this team to support the following out-of-the-box targets:

all
  Generate all configured build artifacts for this project.

check
  Generate all configured build artifacts and run all unit 
  and functional tests for this project.

coverage
  Generate all configured build artifacts, run all unit 
  and functional tests, and generate code coverage results 
  for this project.

dist
  Generate an archive distribution snapshot for this project.

distcheck
  Generate an archive distribution snapshot for this project 
  and sanity check the resulting distribution by running 
  'make check' on it for this project.

doc
  Generate documentation for the project.

docdist
  Generate an archive distribution of the documentation for 
  the project.

install
  Generate all configured build artifacts for this project 
  and install them in DESTDIR on the build host system.

install-headers
  Generate all configured public header artifacts for this 
  project and install them in DESTDIR on the build host 
  system.

pretty
    (Re-)format a collection of project source files.

lint | pretty-check
  Check but do not (re-)format a collection of project 
  source files.

• Seamlessly and easily supports both clang and gcc.
• Supports Android, iOS, POSIX standalone, and embedded cross-compiled targets without changing the core build system.

[hawk248]

If we have debated and decided a single build system around autotools is the way to go and do not want to include another option, then I am OK.

[hawk248]

ok