CMake build system

[surligas]

Hello all,

on behalf of the Skynet team, we were thinking that the existing Makefile build is a little bit "problematic" and slow. Also, the linking is a liitle bit obscure. Adding news CEs alters a lot of core files, so merging every time the new changes of CRTS into our own tree is a time consuming task.

Instead we propose the use of CMake as build system. Here you can check CRTS with CMake as build system. To compile it just follow the instructions below:

1. mkdir build
2. cd build
3. cmake ..
4. make (parallel compilation is supported through the -j option)

All resulting executable binaries for now are located into build/src but this can change of course.

The advantages of CMake are:

• Parallel compilation jobs -> faster compilation
• Very easy and automatic integration of new CEs and controllers (just take a look at cognitive_engines/CMakeLists.txt)

Of course our CMake integration is not 100% ready yet. If you agree to accept it, we could improve it to be even more modular and efficient. For example, instead of using the config_cognitive_engines tool to alter the affected core files, we could let CMake to generate a header file, let's say imported_cognitive_engines.h with all the #include<> directives of cognitive engines header files.

Thus core files like extensible_cognitive_radio.cpp will include only the auto-generated header file and their code will remain unaffected even with new CEs or controllers integration.

[ericps1]

Hi Manolis,

This certainly looks like an interesting option. I'd like to ask a couple of questions to clarify your issues with the current approach and how your proposed changes might work/improve things. I haven't really worked with cmake much so please forgive my ignorance.

So currently whenever you edit your CE and run make you will recompile the object files for your CE and extensible_cognitive_radio.cpp as well as the crts_cognitive_radio executable. Does the cmake approach somehow avoid one or more of these steps? If you could briefly explain how this works I'd appreciate it.

The auto-generated header makes sense in terms of not touching the extensible_cognitive_radio.cpp file but you're still effectively changing the includes so won't it still need to be recompiled and subsequently crts_cognitive_radio as well? The other issue that wasn't mentioned is that you'd need a similar approach for the ExtensibleCognitiveRadio::set_ce() function, otherwise the file contents are still changing anyways and you still have to run the config_cognitive_engines tool. Do you have a method of doing this as well?

Thanks,
Eric