Learning BIRD source

[Maria Matějka]

On April 12, 2019 8:52:47 PM GMT+02:00, Brian Topping <brian.topping at gmail.com> wrote:
>Developer team:
>
>I’d like to get better with the source. Due to being an inferior
>specimen and/or too many other projects, I need help from tools like
>CLion to make sense of source trees within weeks instead of years.
>
>Are others working on BIRD source within IDEs? I know "real programmers
>use vim and emacs”, etc, but please refer to previous paragraph in that
>case… For all it matters, I am not a bush league developer, I have
>written code using bison and flex and am super stoked to get my hands
>dirty here.

I think any IDE with C support you like should work, maybe except for Visual Studio which has no real C compiler anyway so it won't build there at all.

>One option that presents itself to me is converting the build from
>Autotools to CMake. That’s sure to make someone’s blood boil. But if
>not (or there is a similarly worthy tool folks would accept), would
>such a transition be PR-worthy? Because it’s declarative vs.
>procedural, CMake is possible for IDEs to ingest and make sensible
>semantic presentations with. That leads to better productivity and more
>possible contributors in the long run.

If you convince me to merge it, no problem. Which is more dangerous that it seems to be -- I'm quite a strong opponent against almost any generator of makefiles. What I accept is how it is done now – the configure script generates only a little part of one of the Makefiles, all others being autoincluded.

One of the main reasons is simply that it adds another layer of indirection which should have really good reasons. 

BTW almost any IDE I know about has an option to set what to run to rebuild so I don't understand much what about IDE compatibility should improve with conversion to CMake. 

Maria