[CMake-Promote] understanding the CMake build

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi Brandon,

Von: "Brandon J. Van Every" <bvanevery at gmail.com>

...
> That's true.  I'm currently the only CMake expert, although I do have 
> confidence that in time, Felix will pick up what he needs.  I wonder, 
> why would anyone else want to understand the CMake build?  Unless they 
> wanted to extend it, I can't think of a reason.  Even a core Chicken 
> language developer could get by with very little understanding of the 
> build, if they were working on an aspect of Chicken that doesn't have 
> build-visible effects.

Everybody who builds software should understand the buildsystem. This was not possible with autotools, but now is possible again with cmake :-)
In KDE not everybody has learned CMake until now, but we have right now (after 6 months) as least as many people knowing the buildsystem as we had after years of autotools, and we have now already more who understand it at least a bit.

> Turning the build into a CMake tutorial, and pushing it at Kitware via 
> CMake-Promote, does sound like a good idea.  It would attract people who 
> aren't really interested in Chicken, but who want to learn CMake.  It 
> would make the build easier to understand.  Other things are needed as 
> well though.  CMake online documentation in general is poor.  The 
> mailing list is great, you can get all your questions rapidly answered 
> there, but documentation is definitely a serious shortcoming.
> 
> Not that people are better off with Autotools.  It's better documented, 
> but the whole toolchain will drive you nuts.  You still need those 
> 
> Anyways, the reality is I don't have time for tutorializing the CMake 
> build right now.  Nor will it be my 1st priority when I do have time.  
> 1st priority is OpenGL and games.  Actually, those could become vectors 
> for both CMake and Chicken promotion.  This is all very future-looking 
> though.  Pretty much the same reason why the CMake online docs don't 
> improve; everyone's too busy with something more important.

I really don't understand why you claim so often that the online docs are so poor. Surely they can be improved. They were good enough for me. Much better than the autotools docs. I tried to learn autotools several times, but failed  (autoconf alone is ok, maybe automake alone too, but everything together is beyond me).

About the not-improving docs: that's simply not true.
Since January several pages were added to the Wiki, and several HOWTOs have popped up on the web and linked in the Wiki. If a developers goes through the Wiki, he will find a lot of information. IMO everything to get him started.
So, just take one evening every two or three or four weeks exclusively to work on the CMake Wiki, your fellow Chicken developers will thank you, and all other cmake users too :-)

Bye
Alex

P.S. IMO currently the biggest promo item by far for CMake is KDE4 :-)

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