On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 6:54 PM Horváth V. <friendlyan...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello internals, > > I'm writing to you to find out what the reception here is regarding the > idea of moving the PHP project to build using CMake. > > I have looked around and I found 2 attempts of doing just that in the > past (in 2008 via GSoC and something else maybe in 2014 that I couldn't > find the exact info for before writing this email), but nothing came of > those attempts. I have also briefly suggested the idea to Sara Golemon > on Reddit and she didn't seem to be completely against the idea. > > For my attempt, I would also optionally use Conan as a means of fetching > dependencies in a cross-platform manner, which would make the need for > OS specific SDKs (like the Windows one) unnecessary. Thanks to CMake's > amazing customizability, using Conan can be made completely optional and > PHP could still continue to build with just system dependencies. > > Moving the build system to use CMake instead of the current split > between a *nix and Windows solution would bring everything to one place > and providing CMake bits in the install interface of PHP would make it > easier to develop and use PHP from a development point of view thanks to > CMake packages. > > I am planning to make a YouTube video of the whole process of me doing > this grunt work, while I explore the current situation regarding > building PHP and explain what I do and why. I think that it'd generally > be a good thing to have such a video for transparency and it could be > interesting educational material for people who are in a similar > situation and wish to move to building their projects using CMake. > > For reference, I occasionally contribute to the CMake project, I'm the > author of https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init which aims to > simplify quickly scaffolding a CMake project that's setup correctly and > I'm in the process of peer reviewing a CMake related book. > > Let me know what you think. > My main question would be how this will affect 3rd party extensions, which are currently using autoconf. Will they need to migrate to cmake, or will we have to effectively maintain both build systems? Generally, I do think that migrating to cmake makes sense though. Regards, Nikita
