[CMake] Suggestion for CMake platform/compiler detection

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi Brandon,

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

...
> > Then, I read the article (http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/) by Alex on 
> > KDE's
> > switch from autotools to cmake.  That article really resonated with me
> > (especially the remarks about simple CMake syntax which every developer
> > would find it easy to understand) so I presented the possibility to the
> > PLplot development list of moving to a CMake build system.  However, I 
> > got
> > the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" standard reaction that Brandon 
> > noted
> > above.  Fortunately, I ignored that reaction.
> >
> > One of the advantages of trying out CMake for an autotoolized project 
> > is the
> > two build systems can coexist peacefully.  Also, as Brandon noted the 
> > CMake
> > syntax is really easy to learn so you can quickly show some results.  
> > So all
> > it really takes to start the move to cmake is just for one catalyst
> > developer for a project to be convinced enough to make a start.
> >
> > I was that catalyst guy for PLplot. I started in early July soon after
> > Alex's article came out. I soon had a proof-of-concept CMake build for 
> > one
> > of our simpler libraries, 
> 
> Getting started with CMake is easy.  It lulls people into a false sense 
> of security about the amount of work involved... which from a CMake 
> promotion standpoint, is a good thing.  I'm cynical about what it takes 
> to *finish* such jobs.  In the absence of money, I wouldn't undertake it 
> again.

Why ? What was that hard ?
For me, getting the RPATH stuff was hard (since I didn't understand RPATH at all before this), finding a way to detect Qt4 so that it works for everybody was hard and doing the automoc stuff which KDE developers are used to was hard.
Beside that, once I understood how generating sources during the build work, there where no big problems.
Just a *lot* of work, where Laurent Montel did a huge job, I mean, we have millions lines of code.

Said that, one year earlier this wouldn't have been possible, since at that time the then newly introduced non-recursive makefile generator still needed some time to mature.

In the beginning there was basically nobody on my side, we started with scons. This didn't work out, so David (one of our core developers) gave me the "go" to try my luck with cmake. I did that and today I'm the buildsystem maintainer. Not sure I'm happy about this ;-)

Bye
Alex

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