Subject: [bitcoindev] Bitcoin Core's migration to the CMake buildsystem

From: Cory Fields <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2024 14:47:24 -0700 (PDT)

Hi All

I realize this is not a Bitcoin Core list, but I think this is relevant 
enough to many downstream developers to bring up here.

Hennadii Stepanov (hebasto) has been working hard for several years now to 
replace Bitcoin Core's Autotools-based buildsystem with a modern CMake one. 
Most of the developers who support the current buildsystem have been 
reviewing this work chunk-by-chunk in hebasto's staging branch since 
February of last year. As I've been helping with guidance and review of 
this work, hebasto has asked me to share a quick summary of our progress.

Anyone who's ever been around for a buildsystem migration in a large 
software project knows what a massive undertaking this is, as well as the 
frustrations that come along with it. This one is no exception. So before 
going further, I'd like to commend hebasto on his hard work and patience to 
get this far. Thanks, hebasto!

In the process, we've upstreamed dozens of bugfixes and modernizations for 
our various build-time and run-time dependencies. Thanks especially to 
Michael Ford (fanquake) for that effort. In the true open-source spirit, 
other users of those dependencies have received some free improvements from 
this work.

Now that it's gone through a long round of review by the buildsystem devs, 
we believe it's in good enough shape to merge into master in the upcoming 
weeks as planned, soon after feature-freeze for v28 and branch-off for v29.

We recognize that this will be a bumpy time for Bitcoin Core dev. It's 
simply impossible to avoid problems with a change like this. We believe 
that common workflows should be mostly uninterrupted, but those of you 
targeting esoteric platforms or build configs are more likely to run into 
some issues. So this would be a good time (before merge!) for anyone who 
builds Bitcoin Core to give the CMake branch a try and let us know about 
any trouble you've run into.

Please re-read that last paragraph. This _will_ be a painful process. 
Please try to be constructive/productive with your bug reports.

The current PR can be found here: 
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/30454

The build-related documentation has been updated there. Please consider 
that documentation to be canonical, so if there's a question that's not 
answered (or info that's stale), please mention it in the form of a review 
on the pull request so that everyone can benefit.

FAQ:

Q: Noooooooooo!!!
A: That's not a question :). Maintaining Autotools is a huge burden and 
it's only getting worse over time as it's virtually (though not entirely) 
unmaintained. As the person who introduced and maintained the current 
buildsystem and maintained it for years (though others like fanquake and 
hebasto have been more active for the last few) I'm happy to see it go. She 
sure was a good ship.

Q: Why CMake? Why not [my favorite buildsystem]
A: Because CMake is a perfectly reasonable choice for a modern free and 
open-source buildsystem with substantial momentum. And also because hebasto 
stepped up to actually do the work.

Q: Will Autotools continue to be supported?
A: Not in master, no. We (the buildsystem devs) don't believe it's worth 
the pain/effort of maintaining parallel buildsystems for a project as large 
as Bitcoin Core. We plan to delete everything relating to Autotools within 
days of merging CMake. However, we have no intention of backporting CMake 
to previous branches, so we'll have to maintain it to a small degree there.

Q: When/how will this affect me as a user of Bitcoin Core.
A: If don't build Bitcoin Core from source, or if you don't know what that 
means, you shouldn't notice any change.

Q: When/how will this affect me as a developer who interacts with Bitcoin 
Core?
A: For builders of Core who are not Core devs, You'll probably encounter a 
new way of building Core when v29 is released, sometime mid next year. At 
that point, rather than "./configure && make", you'll be using "cmake -S . 
-B build && cmake --build build". With any luck, by then, most of the bugs 
will have been reported and fixed, and builds will just work.

Q: When/how will this affect me as a Core-dev?
A: Today! Now! Please try out #30454 and report any issues there. Please 
try to avoid bikeshedding as much as possible though.

Q: How do I configure the build? Where are the old options?
A: All relevant options have been ported over. See the docs for more 
details, but as a hint, the ccmake tool is very useful for listing build 
options.
Additionally, hebasto has been keeping up with a feature-parity table here: 
https://gist.github.com/hebasto/2ef97d3a726bfce08ded9df07f7dab5e

Q: Why is X tool or Y feature off by default?
A: We've decided to stick to the CMake way of doing things as much as 
possible. This way, a quick web search for "how to do Z with CMake" will 
probably turn up helpful and correct answers. Although, this paradigm 
switch is where we anticipate the most friction and frustration for users 
during the transition. While Autotools convention is to automatically find 
and enable features when possible (like enabling a feature if a library 
happens to exist on your system), the common CMake way is to require 
explicit opt-ins. This leads to fewer surprises as there's less magic 
happening out of sight, but may require a small upfront time investment to 
get back to the builds you're used to.

Q: Are all of CMake's cool features supported?
A: Some, not all. Focus has been on getting the initial port done 
correctly, with less effort going to fringe features and non-makefile 
generators. Generally speaking, single-config Makefiles have received the 
most attention. Ninja should just work. Multi-config builds may work, but 
we don't guarantee/support that just yet. MSVC should be in good shape as 
that's hebasto's platform of choice. XCode is known to work, but it's 
currently not very usable as it's unorganized and the build is full of 
irrelevant warnings. We'll clean those up in due time, but they're not high 
priority as we consider them new features as opposed to part of the initial 
port.

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