[CMake-Promote] First order of business.

[William A. Hoffman]

Well I guess you beat me to it.  But this looks like a great start.
Welcome everyone to cmake-promote.  The goals of the group will be
to come up with a plan to increase the use and exposure of CMake
as a build tool.  I personally think there are many programmers out
there that would use CMake if they knew about it.  Having more users
would of course be beneficial to the current users, more bugs found/fixed,
more standard installations will include CMake, etc, etc.  

Brandon and I have talked some and came up with the following list:

- Create a cmake-promote list, and try to get people interested in
promoting CMake.

- Create a Success stories link off the main CMake web page.
There is a start on the Wiki here:
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Projects
I have also been using google to try and find projects using CMake,
and have a list that I will post in a separate email. 

- Create a testimonials section as well, with catchy quotes about
how great CMake is.

I suggest that as we formulate ideas on how to proceed we put the action
items on the CMake Wiki.

-Bill

At 07:50 PM 12/15/2005, Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva wrote:
>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
>
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