[debhelper-devel] Bug#895044: debhelper: add support for Ninja with CMake

[Kyle Edwards]

Package: debhelper
Version: 11.1.6
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

Large projects which use CMake, such as VTK, take a long time to build
with the Makefile generator, and see significant build time improvements
when being built with the Ninja generator instead. Please consider
adding support for using the Ninja generator with CMake. Perhaps
something like:

$ dh --buildsystem=cmakeninja

I realize this may be tricky given how the buildsystems are implemented
in debhelper. I don't know much about Perl, but if it supports multiple
inheritance, would it be possible to make a class like "cmakebase" and
then have "cmake" and "cmakeninja" inherit from both "cmakebase" and
then "makefile" and "ninja" respectively?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  autotools-dev            20180224.1
ii  dh-autoreconf            17
ii  dh-strip-nondeterminism  0.040-1
ii  dpkg                     1.19.0.5
ii  dpkg-dev                 1.19.0.5
ii  file                     1:5.32-2
ii  libdpkg-perl             1.19.0.5
ii  man-db                   2.8.2-1
ii  perl                     5.26.1-5
ii  po-debconf               1.0.20

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
pn  dh-make  <none>
pn  dwz      <none>

-- no debconf information