[aur-general] Compiling with CMake

[Guilhem Saurel]

Hi,

In AUR, there are many packages with an old-school

> mkdir build && cd build
> cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
> make

Other packages say they require ninja and use

> mkdir build && cd build
> cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -G Ninja ..
> ninja

But I think we should let the end user choose if they want make or ninja, by
letting them configure their CMAKE_GENERATOR environment variable¹


Currently if someone has CMAKE_GENERATOR=Ninja in their environment, many AUR
packages in the first category will fail, because eg.:

> […]
> -- Configuring done
> -- Generating done
> -- Build files have been written to: /home/nim/.cache/paru/clone/octomap/src/octomap-1.9.8/octomap/build
> make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

And on the other hand for the second case, packages say they require ninja while
they would work as well with make.

Therefore I think we should ask CMake to compile, no matter which generator is
available on the machine and/or was chosen by the user, with:

> mkdir build && cd build
> cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
> cmake --build .

Or even better

> cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
> cmake --build build

Any opinions ? Should we put that on the wiki² ?
Or write an RFC, like ³ ?


Cheers !


Guilhem,
aka. Nim65s



¹: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/envvar/CMAKE_GENERATOR.html
²: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CMake_package_guidelines
³: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/10
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