Re: Is a modern build system acceptable for older platforms

>
> The above is all about getting the build system to work at all. If that
> isn't a showstopper there's a subsequent discussion to be had about older
> platforms where one could get the build system to work but convenient
> packages are missing. For example not even RHEL7 has any Python3 packages
> in the base system (it does in Software Collections though) which means
> some extra hoops on getting meson running there. And RHEL5 is in an even
> worse spot as it has no Software Collections, who knows if Python 3 builds
> on it out of the box etc.
>

I would expect that a new version of software should not target versions of
platform that are end of full support. Per
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata currently only
RHEL7 is at Full Support, and RHEL5 is already past Product Retirement. I
would say it's fine to support these at already released branches, but
limiting .

PostGIS has several forks that move it towards CMake (five-year-old ticket
https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/2362, forks
https://github.com/nextgis-borsch/postgis,
https://github.com/mloskot/postgis/tree/cmake-build) - none of these are
upstream mostly because there's an expectation to match the Postgres build
system. If Postgres moved to CMake (there are already CMake-enabled forks
available for people who) then I expect PostGIS to quickly catch up.

A lot of libraries PostGIS depends on are already built using CMake, so if
the platform has recent PostGIS it has CMake available somehow.

Darafei Praliaskouski,
GIS Engineer / Juno Minsk