[CMake-Promote] Dart difficult to sell

[Brandon Van Every]

On 6/6/07, Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com> wrote:
>
> Perforce is not yet supported cvs, and svn are the only ones right now.
> You might be able to use execute_process to run the perforce command
> in a ctest script.

A webpage with demonstrated proof-of-concept for other revision
control systems would extremely valuable for trying to pitch
CMake+Dart.  I think homebrew demonstration would be acceptable, as
long as it can be shown to provably work for a large project.  Has
anyone actually done this yet?

As it stands now, Dart is a non-starter for some shops.  A Perforce
shop isn't going to change to CVS or Subversion.  It is by all
accounts an excellent version control system, and the shops that use
it generally have the money to use it.  They would look for a
commercial $$$$ tool that does the same thing Dart does.

Even if they were seeking to change from Perforce to something else,
there's the reality that the build system is a critical component of
enterprise development and is not thrown out overnight.  For instance
the Mozilla people recently migrated from CVS to Mercurial, a
distributed revision control system.  It looks like it has been 9
months and they're not done yet.

Thus it is important to see Dart demonstrated with other build
systems.  Otherwise if they're not already committed to Subversion and
happy with it, Dart is not a talking point.  Which is regrettable when
it comes to promoting CMake.

I have wondered if some revision control systems, like Mercurial and
Darcs, can be made to masquerade as CVS.  And thus run even Dart1.
Haven't chased this down though.  I doubt Perforce offers this, nor
would it be desired by Perforce shops even if it could be done, as it
would have a jerry rigged quality to it, but I haven't really chased
it down.

> > ...the Dart webpage has several entries *seriously* out of date.
> > Like, "we might be doing something in 2001, stay tuned" kind of stuff.
> > This is BAD.  I don't think I want to wave this under a hiring
> > manager's nose, I think he'll flee in terror.
> >
> Actually, that is the Dart1 page, that although used quite a bit,
> is being replaced by Dart2:
>
> http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Dart2Summary
>
> Dart2 has better documentation that can be found on that wiki.

This is true, but when I point a potential user at the CMake webpage,
they run into the Dart1 webpage, if I'm mentioning Dart.  The Dart1
webpage should be modernized, so that it looks like a mature
technology instead of an unsupported technology.  That's what most
people would assume if they saw action items for 2001 on a webpage.

Right now I'm no longer mentioning Dart.  Too risky to my credibility.

I'd fix the webpages myself if they were a wiki.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every