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 tasks 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.