This completely removes the old system of mkfiles.pl + Recipe + .R
files that I used to manage the various per-platform makefiles and
other build scripts in this code base. In its place is a
CMakeLists.txt setup, which is still able to compile for Linux,
Windows, MacOS, NestedVM and Emscripten.
The main reason for doing this is because mkfiles.pl was a horrible
pile of unmaintainable cruft. It was hard to keep up to date (e.g.
didn't reliably support the latest Visual Studio project files); it
was so specific to me that nobody else could maintain it (or was even
interested in trying, and who can blame them?), and it wasn't even
easy to _use_ if you weren't me. And it didn't even produce very good
makefiles.
In fact I've been wanting to hurl mkfiles.pl in the bin for years, but
was blocked by CMake not quite being able to support my clang-cl based
system for cross-compiling for Windows on Linux. But CMake 3.20 was
released this month and fixes the last bug in that area (it had to do
with preprocessing of .rc files), so now I'm unblocked!
CMake is not perfect, but it's better at mkfiles.pl's job than
mkfiles.pl was, and it has the great advantage that lots of other
people already know about it.
Other advantages of the CMake system:
- Easier to build with. At least for the big three platforms, it's
possible to write down a list of build commands that's actually the
same everywhere ("cmake ." followed by "cmake --build ."). There's
endless scope for making your end-user cmake commands more fancy
than that, for various advantages, but very few people _have_ to.
- Less effort required to add a new puzzle. You just add a puzzle()
statement to the top-level CMakeLists.txt, instead of needing to
remember eight separate fiddly things to put in the .R file. (Look
at the reduction in CHECKLST.txt!)
- The 'unfinished' subdirectory is now _built_ unconditionally, even
if the things in it don't go into the 'make install' target. So
they won't bit-rot in future.
- Unix build: unified the old icons makefile with the main build, so
that each puzzle builds without an icon, runs to build its icon,
then relinks with it.
- Windows build: far easier to switch back and forth between debug
and release than with the old makefiles.
- MacOS build: CMake has its own .dmg generator, which is surely
better thought out than my ten-line bodge.
- net reduction in the number of lines of code in the code base. In
fact, that's still true _even_ if you don't count the deletion of
mkfiles.pl itself - that script didn't even have the virtue of
allowing everything else to be done exceptionally concisely.
This is that annoying feature of up-to-date 'convert' in which
converting to or from a PNG file defaults to returning RGB values that
have been 'helpfully' gamma-corrected (or some such) from the exact
data stored in the source file to some nonsense you didn't want.
Usually the worst this causes is slightly washed-out looking graphics,
but in this case, since my entire aim was to squash the image into a
specific set of exact RGB values so as to turn it into a paletted
Windows icon file, it caused an actual build failure when the next
loop in icon.pl couldn't find the gamma-corrected values in its
expected palette map, and no wonder.
It actually went off this morning, after an upgrade of ImageMagick,
and I found that it contained both unprintable characters in the
colour description and the wrong variable in the coordinate display.
supports monochrome icons, can deal with any size of image you're
mad enough to put in there, and will construct icons with whatever
combination of sizes and resolutions you feel like specifying. This
has involved a change in the command-line syntax, hence the
adjustment to Makefile.
(I don't imagine that the changes described here will be critical to
Puzzles any time soon, but I might reuse this script elsewhere and
then I won't want it to have arbitrary limitations.)
[originally from svn r7031]
screenshots into appropriate sizes and colour depths. This is all
done with a nasty Perl script, because ImageMagick does not output
correct .ICO format. Not sure why; it isn't _that_ hard.
I intend at some point to link the resulting icons into the actual
Windows puzzle binaries, but before then I have to make them
prettier: most of them would benefit from being derived from a
smaller crop of the puzzle screenshot instead of trying to fit the
whole thing in.
[originally from svn r7017]
