Re: CMake builds :)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 20:57:47 -0500
> From:  Kuba Sunderland-Ober via "Bug reports only for gawk." 
> <bug-gawk@gnu.org>
> Ahem :) I would have used it if I had read those NEWS before writing a new
> CMakeFile for gawk 5.3.0 :)
> 
> There are various projects that need gawk to generate source files - gcc is
> one of them. Building those under Windows is easy if gawk and a couple
> other tools like flex and bison are included in the build, and are built
> with
> cmake.
> 
> Most gnu tools are so small that compiling them takes very little
> time, so this is very much feasible. The typical use case is
> building complete software packages, with build-time dependencies,
> using MS Visual Studio.
> 
> In particular, I've ported sdcc's build system to cmake, and it uses
> winflexbison's "native" cmake build script, gcc's preprocessor (I
> wrote cmake support for it), and gawk (yep, wrote CMakeLists for
> that too).
> 
> Unfortunately, since autotools-based builds seem to have to remain
> in perpetuity, it's unlikely that re-adding this would be considered
> productive?

Building Gawk for Windows doesn't involve Autotools.  All you need is
a version of the Make utility that can handle pc/Makefile and
pc/Makefile.ext makefiles.  The instructions are in
README_d/README.pc.  If you have problems building the Windows port of
Gawk, please show the problems and any necessary details.

In general, building the Windows port doesn't currently support any
development environments except MinGW, so you could potentially have
problems if you use something else.  But adding support for such other
environments is probably much easier than adding back CMake support
and maintaining it through the years to come.

> I will push my work to github - it's minimal but good enough to
> target Windows using gawk and mingw.

If you use MinGW, all you need is a Windows port of GNU Make.  So I'm
unsure why we need CMake if the justification is the need to build the
Windows/MinGW port of Gawk.