[gnutls-devel] GnuTLS | add cmake (!1908)

[Read-only notification of GnuTLS library development activities]

Eli Schwartz commented on a discussion: https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/-/merge_requests/1908#note_2270875629


> @tal.regev I don't see any arguments about *why* this would be useful or needed? Seems it's following the trendy 'migrate Autotools to the X newfangled build system' hobby. The strongest arguments I've heard for CMake are "it auto-generates project files for Windows!", which leaves me wanting more, especially for a GNU package.


The linked issue suggests that speed of building gnutls is a motivation,
in particular due to the requirement of GNU autotools as being a
fork+exec-oriented programming language, in contrast to other
programming languages which are usually OOP or FP.

Of course that's not necessarily a reason for the maintainers to switch
build systems. But @daiki did suggest that meson is preferable over
cmake specifically because it avoids the turing tarpit of lengthy macros
hidden away in resource files.

"This is important from the security point of view, after the XZ
incident, which was abusing the extensibility of Autotools macros."

Naturally, autotools shares the same turing extensibility tarpit problem
that cmake has, so the argument for "meson > cmake" would also say
"meson > autotools".

:shrug: It's very much a trend thing any way you slice it. Some would
argue a switch would be a "nice-to-have". I find it hard to accept it
being a "requirement" anyway.

@tal.regev does contribute to Microsoft's vcpkg, and vcpkg has a gnutls
package -- but not one that builds on Windows, apparently, so that may
have something to do with it. It's definitely possible to build on
Windows via mingw, though -- e.g. MSYS2 manages it just fine, if perhaps
a bit slowly on their buildbots.

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