[Proj] Coming releases of PROJ.4

[Charles Karney]

On 06/22/2017 03:55 PM, Howard Butler wrote:
> but ditching autotools that has worked for people for decades does not. 
> That change would ripple into packagers and the distros for little or no 
> appreciable benefit.
> 

I certainly appreciate the point that functionality (in this case,
autotools configuration) shouldn't be needlessly withdrawn.  However,
maintaining both cmake and autotools configurations entails ongoing
maintenance costs and I, for one, wish that autotools could be slowly
replaced by cmake.

The big benefit of cmake is that it's cross-platform.  Even though it
has its warts, it handles package dependencies in a (more or less)
uniform way, it's actively maintained, etc.

autotools is Unix only, depends on the m4 language that hardly anyone
knows, and the whole mess seems to be duct-taped together.  Its big
advantage is that it's been around for longer.

So my question is: aside for simple inertia (which I understand!), what
is stopping the Unix/Linux world adopting cmake?  Is there really
something about autotools that's superior to cmake for maintaining
packages on Linux distributions?

   --Charles