kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the tasks that I have committed to working on in the KiCad road
map is to clean up the current mess we have created by allowing
dependency libraries to be built as part of the KiCad source build.  The
only exception I see for the time being is Boost.  Although I am have my
reservations on that as well.  Why you ask?  I've spent several days
trying to get KiCad to build on Windows using MSYS2 as my build
environment and mingw64 as my target environment.  Every single library
dependency with the exception of our custom Boost and avhttp (which
could easily be build and installed using CMake) are already packaged
for me.  However, the current KiCad build insists on downloading and
building some libraries from source that are already installed.  This is
silly.  I can resolve the issues by passing all of the
PACKAGE_ROOT_PATHs when I run CMake but that is silly as well since my
build environment already points the correct path.

Originally I intended to create a separate project to build the KiCad
library dependencies but I have since changed my mind.  I do *not* think
it is asking too much of developers to learn how to build and/or install
libraries on their preferred platform.  If as a developer you must have
this done for you automatically, I am going to please ask that *you*
create a separate platform specific build tool such as the excellent
kicad-winbuilder that Brian has created.  This will significantly
simplify the KiCad CMake files and eliminate the situation I described
above.  My preference and goal is that the KiCad CMake files be used to
build KiCad, not library dependencies.

Initially, I plan to remove the dependencies that do not require any
patching to build which currently are avhttp, swig, cairo, libpng,
pixman, pcre, pkgconfig, and glew.  Then I will remove the dependencies
with platform specific patches which are openssl, wxwidgets and
wxpython.  Then I will try to figure out what to do with the problem
child that is Boost.  I would also suggest that all platform specific
library dependency build patches be remove as well leaving only the
Boost patches that are required for all platforms (except the context
switching patches).

My goal here is not to step on anyone's toes it is to get our build
system under control so that I can build *KiCad* rather than figure out
how to get the dependencies to build or not as the platform dictates.  I
expect our code to be well designed and I don't think expecting the same
from our build system design is out of line.  If any one has major
objections then we will have to figure something out because I am not
going to continue to spend valuable time fighting our build tools to get
them to properly use the dependencies already installed on my platform.

Wayne