build: add pre-build configure or cmake for local configuration and other benefits

From derek.br...@gmail.com on February 16, 2009 14:42:31

split from issue #2 (closed) : see notes there on why we never needed this for past proprietary products

I would lean toward CMake instead of autoconf http://www.cmake.org/ We could achieve the following with cmake:

configure build for local toolchain tools: currently we have some checks for -T vs -dT, gcc -fvisibility, etc., but we don't build on RHEL3 ( issue #18 (closed) ) due to typedef conflicts, and in the future if we port to other platforms we'll want to add more features like HAVE_PROC_MAPS.
add dependencies back in to core/ (USEDEP=0 right now due to "make clear" bugs with the .dep files: PR 207890, PR 214218)
build in parallel (PR 209902)
reduce Windows building time due to cygpath invocations: move them all to configure time
possibly: hook our tests up to the cmake-integrated CTest and CDash plaform-independent regression testing and reporting engine?

Some issues:

devs have to install cmake but, available on yum, apt-get repos so painless on linux
not clear cmake will support our mix of cygwin paths but microsoft compiler