FEB
23
2010
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News from buildsystem landI haven't blogged about my development activities for some time now... We released KDE SC 4.4. For KDE 4.4.x we still require version CMake 2.6.2 or above, as we do since KDE 4.2.0. This required some effort, to make sure no "code" which requires newer versions gets added somewhere. Right now CMake is at version 2.8.0, and 2.8.1 is in its RC-cycle. Please give it a try, to make sure we get a release which works without problems with the KDE codebase. In the current 4.5 cycle we may increase the required version of CMake, so we can use the newer features again. I see basically two options: upgrade from 2.6.2 to 2.6.3, which would give us parentheses in if()-expressions, and better finding of FooConfig.cmake files. With KDE requiring CMake 2.6.2, and KDE being available not only on Linux, but also other operating systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, OSX and Windows, it becomes important that we can ensure KDE trunk keeps building and running on all these platforms. Luckily, CMake comes together with CTest, which is a tool to drive testing, continuous and nightly builds. This is not yet finished. I'm still working on making it easier to set such nightly builds up and for a project of the size of KDE we need finegrained notification emails. E.g. the maintainer of kcalc in kdeutils may not be interested in problems in other parts of kdeutils, like e.g. okteta. To help with this there is support for subprojects in CTest and CDash, but I'm still not sure how we can make good use of that in KDE, it seems currently still quite some manual work is required. So we may need some modifications in CMake/CTest/CDash to make it easily usable in KDE. Documentation for using subprojects can be found here, the "The Source" edition from July last year. In KDE itself, Harald Fernengel started to work on cross-compiling support for KDE. This work is still in its early phase, but we may well have a cross-compilable KDE 4.5 release :-) ...or at least some parts.
Implementing this in KDE is quite some work. I think it may be even more work to keep cross compiling working then. I guess for that we will really need good working nightly builds. In CMake itself, I'm currently working on adding support for the IAR compiler, which is a compiler for embedded systems. For added fun, the IAR compiler for ARM and the IAR compiler for AVR seem to be two completely unrelated toolchains, using different command line options, linkers and file formats (the AVR compiler uses some proprietary r90 object file format, haven't found any documentation on this yet). Beside that, since a few weeks I own a Symbian mobile phone. So, guess what... So, that's it for now. |
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Comments
xcompiling
What are the current targets for the cross-compiling? I'm guessing Windows or something ARM.
Anyways I look forward to it, should make adding Windows etc to our Hudson build server easy.
Targets
Yes, mostly embedded Linux ARM machines.
Windows would be also ok, but we can build natively on Windows, so this is IMO not that important.
Alex