Re: moving to C11 or later?

Hi there,

On Sun, 16 Aug 2026, Ralph Little wrote:
> On 2026-08-16 12:00, James Ring wrote:
>> ...
>> How about cleaning up the build a bit? Perhaps moving away from
>> autotools and towards something like cmake?
>
> I'm not sure about this. I will give it some thought. If we stick to 
> autotools, it certainly needs to be brought up-to-date. ...
> ...
> I have no personal objection to CMAKE and have used it in the past and it 
> supports more platforms than autotools. I'm just not sure that we have the 
> manpower to go through that kind of process and wonder if it really benefits 
> the project substantially. It would certainly benefit other platforms ...

This subject has been exercising my mind quite a bit recently.  For
what I now feel must be my sins, as of last year I'm the maintainer of
'BackupPC' which uses a bowdlerized mix of ExtUtils::MakeMaker and the
Autotools.  The Autotools boot files are in some cases pilfered from a
different project and hacked into service in different ways.  It looks
to me like lash-up intended to be temporary that got left in there as
it was because it worked.  It's pretty scary because things like the
sizes of rsync data structures can depend on #defines supplied by the
Autotools configuration and then the code will happily write to byte
offsets in these structures which are calculated for the architecture.

Experimenting with both CMake and Meson I've found both seemed likely
to need a lot more work than I have time for (given the overwhelming
AI-assisted CVEs that have turned up lately) so I've put that work to
one side for now but I mean to get back to it as soon as practicable.

The main thing that I came up against was the lack AFAICT of something
in CMake or Meson equivalent to the thing in Autotools that produces a
configure.ac (and then config.h.in - it seemed like it was going to be
a lot of work to get that far).  It might be useful to compare notes,
however sketchy they may be, maybe off-list.

-- 

73,
Ged.