qiBuild and autotools

Introduction

This section is targeted towards autotools users wanting to know more about qiBuild

The comparison between CMake and autotools applies to qiBuild and autotools, too.

So, in a nutshell, using qiBuild/CMake over autotools has the following advantages:

  • Usable on windows without using a POSIX compatibility layer such as mingw or cygwin
  • Can be used with Visual Studio
  • Easy support for cross-compilation
  • Somewhat nicer syntax

Using qiBuild with autotools projects

Right now there are no plans to make it easier to use qibuild with autotools projects.

Here are two small task that could be tackled, though. (Patches welcome!)

Finding autotools-based projects

There is already support for autotools in CMake.

It looks like:

find_package(PkgConfig)
pkg_check_modules(FOO foo-0.42)

Unfortunately, this does not work if foo-0.42.pc is in a toolchain, so you cannot use it to cross-compile a library which depends on foo.

This may be fixed by patching PkgConfig.cmake to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH to CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH and –prefix to CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH when calling pkg-config.

Generating pkg config files

Again, nothing hard to do here.

During the call to qi_stage_lib, it should be easy to generate the .pc file. All the information is already here.

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