[CMake] Suggestion for CMake platform/compiler detection

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> Hi Brandon,
>
> Von: "Brandon J. Van Every" <bvanevery at gmail.com>
>
>
>   
>> 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 ?
>   


Yes, and I almost got evicted crossing the finish line.  It's not a 
pattern I can continue.  If anyone has some inspiring words of wisdom on 
how to consult CMake build migration skills, now would be the time to 
utter them.  :-)


> 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.
>   


Chicken is a smaller project (75K LOC) with smaller numbers of people 
working on it (primarily Felix).  Difficulties scale down: it was *lots* 
of work for me, mostly single-gunning on the CMake build.

> 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 ;-)
>   


I wrote something good enough that I could hand it off to others.  Quite 
feasible for a 75K LOC project.  I don't lose sleep about whether I'll 
be around in the future; the project doesn't strictly require me 
anymore.  I can get hit by a truck and Chicken will still be moving 
along with CMake.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

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