How to build without protobuf

[cvilas]

The readme says

eCAL is message protocol agnostic. You choose the message protocol that fits to your needs like Google Protobuf, CapnProto, Flatbuffers...

But, I am unable to build ecal from source without building protobuf or having protobuf on the host. It is actually possible?

[rex-schilasky]

Hi, current eCAL stable (5.13) is still using Protobuf for its own internal communication (discovery). So from user perspective you can 'use' eCAL with only Protobuf installed on your host.
Future eCAL version (eCAL6, release planned end of January) will use NanoPb Protobuf library statically linked. So the eCAL runtime has no more Protobuf dependencies finally.

[cvilas]

@rex-schilasky is there a development/pre-release branch where I could try building version 6 already? thanks!

[rex-schilasky]

Not yet, you could build the current master branch, this is 'near to' the upcoming v6 release.

[cvilas]

Unfortunately master does not build. I guess I will wait for a release.

  Could not find a package configuration file provided by "CMakeFunctions"
  with any of the following names:

    CMakeFunctionsConfig.cmake
    cmakefunctions-config.cmake

[rex-schilasky]

The documentation is not released yet for eCAL v6, the current documentation fits for v5 only. To build eCAL v6 (master) you need to define a dependency provider. You can check the github actions how the builds are realized for Ubuntu/Windows and macOS. Finally it's an additional CMake option:

-DCMAKE_PROJECT_TOP_LEVEL_INCLUDES=cmake/submodule_dependencies.cmake

What OS you want to build eCAL master for?

[cvilas]

Thanks! That worked.

I build on x86-64 (Ubuntu 24.04), Aarch64 (Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 41, MacOS)