[CMake] retraining Autoconf users on the command line

[Brandon Van Every]

On 8/10/07, dave <dfeustel at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> I understand your desire to be compensated for projects that have the
> potential for being very large sinks of time and energy. I don't have
> any real experience with gnu autotools. I have noticed that there are
> *many* versions closely following each other in time. That suggests the
> tools are evolving quickly and that makes them hard to track. That in turn
> makes automated conversion tools fragile at best.

We can certainly add snippets on how to do various Automake / Autoconf
/ GMake translations in the Tutorials section, in CMake script.  This
would give CMake translators a leg up on the learning curve.  I'd want
to see POSIX or PCRE regex in place before that though.  It's
pointless to teach everyone how to work around ^ and $ bugs with
(\r?\n), or \\1 operators, or exclusions to get around the greedy
matching.

The biggest problems I've run into so far are all about translating
nested IF(cond) logic.  Especially since GMake can have "if"
statements in makefile targets and CMake cannot.  I've got solutions,
but the problem begs for real parsing rather than regex hackery.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every