[Cmake] What I don't understand about CMake

[Stefano Barbato]

I read CMake documentation and examples but there's something I don't 
understand about CMake.

I think that what's good about autotools is that the build environment can be 
shipped with the source package because of its small size but CMake is big to 
distribute with all packages. 

So I thought that CMake had to be installed on developers machines and that 
with a single command it could generate *all* supported platform-native 
makefiles or project files that would be included into distribution packages. 
Probably a small auto-compiling program able to choose between generated 
makefiles/prjfiles (based on on-site tests) could be easily included into the 
distribution source archive (I used this approch when coding my simple unit 
testing engine where the engine core is distributed as source file and 
auto-compiled on end-user machine before anything else).

But my CMake installation seems to be able to generate only my platform 
Makefiles.

So must CMake be installed on destination end-user PCs for them to be able to 
compile? can CMake generate all supported makefiles and project files at 
once? Does this message make any sense? :)

Thanks.

Stefano Barbato