[CMake-Promote] First order of business.

[Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva]

Well, I guess we have to start somewhere :) Besides the long discussion 
about the name of the list that is...

I guess we can start with a few questions and see where this leads us. 
Maybe the answer/debate of each question can move to independent threads.

1. Where is the promoting going to be?

I guess this issue is very important because the whole idea of this 
exercise is to "get the word out". Alexander suggested he will hold talk 
at events like LinuxTag. Releases in places like freshmeat (which I see 
it's already been done), etc. is another step I guess.

2. How do we promote it?

The "word we put out" has to be convincing and interesting... In that 
regard I opened the question of whether we would promote CMake as a 
build tool (replacement for autoconf) or as a package with CTest/Dart? 
Brandon points out that they should be independent efforts and I agree 
to a certain point. Let's leave the details for it's own thread.

Related to this Alexander mentioned: "writing short 
tutorials/howtos/blogs about using cmake" and that is definitely 
necessary and supported by other complaints about lack of documentation.

I would suggest writing a set of slides for different introductory 
levels so that whoever gives talks about CMake can target different 
audiences. I know I will hopefully start a faculty position in August 
2006 and would like to give different talks and seminars about 
programming tools. I also plan to encourage (well maybe I'll force my 
students ;) ) use of CMake and other tools. So, I will definetily 
benefit from and contribute towards such slides.

Also, strengths and weaknesses compared to the competitors... SCons, 
Jam/BJam, Autoconf; what else? What are CMake success stories: VTK, ITK, 
VXL...

3. I guess the "who do we promote it to" determines the how and where...

So maybe we should start by determining what are the populations and 
which we will target (e.g., linux programmers, KDE crowd, windows 
programmers, managers, etc).

4. Other issues we should consider at this time??

Again, maybe we should leave individual discussions for different threads...

Is this helpful to get us started?

--Miguel