What is CMake? ============== CMake is a cross platform build system, that can be used to replace the old auto-tools, providing a nice building environment and advanced features. Some of these features are: * Out of sources build: CMake allows you to build your software into a directory different to the source tree. You can safely delete the build directory and all its contents once you are done. * Multiple generators: classic makefiles can be generated for Unix and MinGW, but also Visual Studio, XCode and Eclipse CDT projects among other types. * Graphic front-ends for configuration and build options. More information and documentation is available at the CMake project site: http://www.cmake.org CMake is free software. You can get the sources and pre-compiled packages for Linux and other systems at: http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html How to use it? ============== 1. You need CMake 3.0.2 or later to build FluidSynth 2. Unpack the FluidSynth sources somewhere, or checkout the repository, and create a build directory. For instance, using a command line shell: $ tar -xvzf Downloads/fluidsynth-x.y.z.tar.gz $ cd fluidsynth-x.y.z $ mkdir build 2. Execute CMake from the build directory, providing the source directory location and optionally, the build options. There are several ways. * From a command line shell: $ pwd fluidsynth-x.y.z $ cd build $ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -Denable-ladspa=1 Valid values for boolean (enable-xxxx) options: 1, 0, yes, no, on, off. * There are also several alternative CMake front-ends, if you don't want to use the command line interface: * ncurses based program, for Linux and Unix: ccmake * GUI, Qt4 based program, multiplatform: cmake-gui * GUI, Windows native program: CMakeSetup.exe 3. Execute the build command. If you used the Makefiles generator (the default in Linux and other Unix systems) then execute make, gmake or mingw32-make. If you generated a project file, use your IDE to build it. You may find more up-to-date information in the project Wiki: https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/wiki/BuildingWithCMake Compiling with make =================== There are many targets available. To see a complete list of them, type: $ make help The build process usually hides the compiler command lines, to show them: $ make VERBOSE=1 There is a "clean" target, but not a "distclean" one. You should use a build directory different to the source tree. In this case, the "distclean" target would be equivalent to simply removing the build directory. To compile the developer documentation, install Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org) and use this command from the root build directory: $ make doxygen If something fails ================== If there is an error message while executing CMake, this probably means that a required package is missing in your system. You should install the missing component and run CMake again. If there is an error executing the build process, after running a flawless CMake configuration process, this means that there may be an error in the source code, or in the build system, or something incompatible in 3rd party libraries. The CMake build system for FluidSynth is experimental. It will take a while until it becomes stable and fully tested. You can help providing feedback, please send a report containing your problems to the FluidSynth development mailing list: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev For developers - how to add a new feature to the CMake build system =================================================================== Let's explain this issue with an example. We are adding D-Bus support to FluidSynth as an optional feature, conditionally adding source files that require this feature. The first step is to add a macro "option()" to the main CMakeLists.txt file, the one that is located at the fluidsynth root directory. file CMakeLists.txt, line 64: option ( enable-dbus "compile DBUS support (if it is available)" on ) Now, let's check if the dbus-1 library and headers are installed, using pkg-config: file CMakeLists.txt, lines 371-377: unset ( DBUS_SUPPORT CACHE ) if ( enable-dbus ) pkg_check_modules ( DBUS dbus-1>=1.0.0 ) set ( DBUS_SUPPORT ${DBUS_FOUND} ) else ( enable-dbus ) unset_pkg_config ( DBUS ) endif ( enable-dbus ) The first line clears the value of the CMake variable DBUS_SUPPORT. If the value of the option "enable-dbus" is true, then the macro pkg_check_modules() is used to test a package named "dbus-1" with version 1.0.0 or later. This macro automatically defines the variables DBUS_LIBRARIES, DBUS_INCLUDEDIR, DBUS_FOUND and others. The value of the last one is assigned to our variable DBUS_SUPPORT for later use. There is a report to summarize the performed checks and the enabled features after the configuration steps, so let's add a line in this report regarding the D-Bus support. file cmake_admin/report.cmake, lines 14-18: if ( DBUS_SUPPORT ) message ( "D-Bus: yes" ) else ( DBUS_SUPPORT ) message ( "D-Bus: no" ) endif ( DBUS_SUPPORT ) The variable DBUS_SUPPORT is available for the CMake files, but we want to make it available to the compilers as well, to conditionally build code using "#ifdef DBUS_SUPPORT". This can be done adding a line to the config.cmake file: file src/config.cmake, lines 22-23: /* Define if D-Bus support is enabled */ #cmakedefine DBUS_SUPPORT @DBUS_SUPPORT@ The file config.cmake will be processed at configure time, producing a header file "config.h" in the build directory with this content, if the dbus support has been enabled and found: /* Define if D-Bus support is enabled */ #define DBUS_SUPPORT 1 Finally, we can add the new source files to the build system for the compiler target with the macro add_library(), and the libraries for the linker target with the macros link_directories() and target_link_libraries(). file src/CMakeLists.txt, lines 57-60 if ( DBUS_SUPPORT ) set ( fluid_dbus_SOURCES fluid_rtkit.c fluid_rtkit.h ) include_directories ( ${DBUS_INCLUDEDIR} ${DBUS_INCLUDE_DIRS} ) endif ( DBUS_SUPPORT ) file src/CMakeLists.txt, lines 163-197 link_directories ( ... ${DBUS_LIBDIR} ${DBUS_LIBRARY_DIRS} ) add_library ( libfluidsynth ... ${fluid_dbus_SOURCES} ... ) file src/CMakeLists.txt, lines 163-197 target_link_libraries ( libfluidsynth ... ${DBUS_LIBRARIES} ... )