Re: Building from souirces

[Kent Boortz]

Igor,

I'm afraid "dry run" will not always work. Simply because it has little value and developers don't spend time on making sure it works.

In this case, some chain of make targets include producing an intermediate binary that creates other source files. And you can't "dry run" that step, make will not know what to do. That is why you get this error message.

While you can view CMake like a "hack" it is a pretty good one and a wide spread one. It enables building from the same build setup both on Unix and Windows. This makes setting up and maintaining the build much simpler.

With GNU autotools you kind of bootstrap the build files. I.e. the distributed sources require very little from the Unix system when it comes to commands. Basically it needs a shell, sed, awk and maybe some more. This is an big advantage if your product targets Unix only.

For CMake you always need to install CMake and when you run it it will not produce build files for the specific system you run on and at the location you are at. I.e. it differs from GNU autotools in that respect.

But it has been decided that the advantages of CMake makes it a better fit for MySQL. Beside maintenance, we want to make sure we support both our Windows and non Windows community users,

kent

Kent Boortz, Release Staff Engineer
Oracle, the MySQL team, www.mysql.com