[CMake-Promote] Interesting blogs and random comments about CMake

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bill Hoffman wrote:

>Here are some interesting blogs and random discussions on CMake I found on the web:
>
>http://www.baus.net/archives/000134.html
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Sounds like a Testimonial to me!

>http://hellewell.homeip.net/phillip/blogs/2005-Oct-28.html
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My first reaction was that this person is cheap, and an unreliable 
software engineer.  Therefore, not worth chasing after, because he's 
unlikely to influence the build tools of important projects.  But on 
second thought, he could be a cheap student.  In which case, making 
CMake palatable to him could be seen as part of an Educational 
strategy.  Going after Education is good because students become the 
next generation of programmers in industry.  They tend to push the tools 
they learned in school.

Some people aren't cheap, they're just looking for a backend compiler 
and nothing more.  This is true for many people in the Chicken Scheme 
crowd, for instance.  The free VCToolkit is perfectly good for them.  
This is a recurring pattern in High Level Languages, for bootstrapping, 
for Foreign Function Interfaces, and especially for HLL --> C compilers.

>http://www.xenopz.com/blog/bartdeboeck/PermaLink,guid,2573f068-cd6d-4d59-a3e1-69c140d9b8f9.aspx
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Tutorials are good.

>http://www.codecomments.com/Software_Engineering/message677613-2.html
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A Testimonial from a team doing heterogeneous platform development would 
be useful.  "This solved our IDE wars.  Everyone uses the tools they 
like, and we get better testing coverage because of it."  If those 2 
points are actually true.  The devil is often in the details.

>http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1668
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How general purpose is am2cmake?

"I didn't want to learn a full scripting language (python). ...cmake is 
simple and has a limited syntax, so it's easy to learn" strikes me as an 
important point to play up when challenging the SCons crowd.  Of course, 
a lot of hackers are going to hurl back, "So what?"  These are the 
people that like Python just fine, or actually like learning new 
scripting languages, regardless of their utility.  But there are also 
people who don't want to be bothered.  They tend to be very pressed for 
time, or Windows developers.

On the other hand, CMake won't be easier to learn than SCons if the 
documentation and tutorials don't improve.

>http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=321943&whichpage=1&#2074742
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It should be very easy to push game developers into using CMake, and 
that's my personal agenda.  I just laugh when I read stuff like, "It was 
a pain, but when I finally learned to use autotools, it was tremendous. 
My program was suddenly a _real_ linux utility with a standard 
install:"  It's just not the dominant industry sensibility about how to 
effectively use one's time.  The more likely challenge is, "We do all 
our development with VC++, why should we care?"  And the answer is, 
"because you're going to port to consoles and run Linux servers, 
right?"  I know CMake doesn't run on any consoles at present, but I 
intend to change that sometime down the road.  At least on the 
Playstation 3, which is using Linux for its core somehow.  I don't 
really care about the other ones, but others can be made to care.  
Something for the future.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur