[CMake] autoconf and cmake
Brandon J. Van Every
bvanevery at gmail.com
Mon Jan 29 00:32:17 EST 2007
Wojciech Jarosz wrote:
> I've been looking through other projects that use CMake in order to
> learn more. I've seen that some (Chicken, Scribus, for example) seem
> to have configure.in files in addition to CMakeList.txt files. I was
> wondering why one would use both autoconf and CMake in the same
> project?
Legacy support. I'd love to banish Autoconf entirely, but that's not
politically doable yet. CMake still hasn't proven that it does
everything right. For instance, right now I'm looking through the CMake
archives about some kind of ld.so.conf issue on Linux. Apparently
Autoconf does something automagically with library paths that CMake
doesn't, and we need to do something additional on CMake. When you have
an installed base that's using Autoconf, it takes a long time to migrate
people to something new. People slowly poke at the new stuff
eventually, and when it works better than the new stuff, people
gradually switch. When it works the same, they don't tend to move on,
they stick with what they know. And when the new stuff breaks, as
inevitably happens with a new build system, they don't bother checking
again for many months.
On the bright side, the other day CMake worked and Autoconf didn't, for
some Linux build. That's progress. Means the breakage is occurring in
the correct place. ;-)
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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