[Dune] Dune and CMake

[Christian Engwer]

Hi Andreas,

> I'm not really familliar with the internals of dunecontrol, but I guess that 
> generating a CMake based module would be mostly "search and replace". (This 
> assumes that dependency tree generation is done inside dunecontrol and does 
> not rely on any autotools specific stuff.)

For the beginning there is nothing to be changed in dunecontrol. You
can write your own functions in the dune.module file. For every
command you can overwrite the default by providing a run_$COMMAND
shell function. For example the dune-web module doesn't need any
autogen stuff, thus it has a method

run_autogen () {
  true
}

> The real problem is to implement the CMake modules required for DUNE modules 
> properly and to  write the CMakeFiles. (I especially don't have experience on 
> how to build the documentation using CMake, but I guess this is doable.) 

If we want to have CMake as a replacement this is indeed the tricky
part. I am also sure that everything is doable, the main question is
how much work it would be.

> It is true that I wanted (and still want) to provide a patch for dune-common 
> and dune-grid, but it is not very high on my priority list and at the moment 
> I'm quite short on time, so I cannot promise when I will be done.

Actually it also isn't very high on the dune-priority-list.

Cheers
Christian

> Kind Regards
>   Andreas
> 
> Am Montag, 15. Februar 2010 18:58:16 schrieb Oliver Sander:
> > Hi!
> > I have been wanting to ask the following concerning cmake
> > for quite a while.  My question goes both the people in Stuttgart
> > and to the maintainers of the Dune build system.  Is it possible
> > _without being very invasive_, to extend the duneproject script
> > to create on demand either an AutoTools build system or a
> > cmake build system in the new module?  I know this would involve
> > modifying dunecontrol so as to also build Dune modules
> > with a cmake build system.  To make things easier one could
> > say that cmake modules cannot be depended upon.
> > I think it would be interesting to have such a mechanism
> > (again, I stress: if it is not too invasive), because it would give
> > the users more choice and allow us to try out cmake and
> > evaluate it.
>