[Live-devel] Recommends using CMAke management live555 project

[Ross Finlayson]

The suggestion of replacing the "genMakefiles"/"genWIndowsMakefiles" configuration tools with "cmake" comes up every few years.  The last time someone suggested it was in June 2010; here is my response from back then:
	http://lists.live555.com/pipermail/live-devel/2010-June/012244.html

Unfortunately the results of the poll that I called for then were underwhelming, to say the least.  I got 8 responses.  2 people said that they wanted the configuration tools left as is.  3 people said that they would prefer switching to "cmake".  The other 3 people said that they didn't care either way.  So, with such an anemic response, I concluded that there was simply no consensus for making such a change.  The fact that more than 2 years elapsed until anyone proposed this again reinforces this conclusion.

But there's a more practical objection to using "cmake": It - at least with the configuration file that was provided - doesn't work for all platforms/development environments that we support.  I tried it yesterday, and found:
- It works on Mac OS X (except that it got the names of the target application binaries (e.g., "live555MediaServer") wrong; however, I assume that that is something that could easily be fixed).
- It doesn't work on FreeBSD, because to successfully compile the code on FreeBSD, the flag "-DXLOCALE_NOT_USED=1" needs to be added to the command line.  Similarly, for various other platforms, other (platform-specific) flags need to be added.  For the existing tools, the "config.<os>" files serve this purpose.  For "cmake", presumably some similar platform-specific configuration stuff would need to be added - which would defeat the supposed simplicity benefit of using "cmake".
- For Windows, it doesn't seem to support certain old versions of Microsoft 'Visual Studio' - e.g., version 5.0 (which is what I happen to use for testing LIVE555 builds for Windows).

So based on all this: Although anyone is (of course) welcome to use "cmake" or any other tools themselves.  However, at least for now, I won't be supporting it in our released code.


Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/

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