[CMake] Documentation strategy

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-06-20 20:33-0400 Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On 6/20/07, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>> the subversion book
>> (freely downloadable from http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ in a number of
>> editions and translations) is a huge lifesaver, and I think it is one of 
>> the
>> fundamental reasons why subversion is finally overcoming CVS's
>> "first-to-market" advantage.  The analogy between subversion and CVS on 
>> the
>> one hand, and CMake and autottools on the other is pretty good in the 
>> sense
>> that you have outstanding new software that replaces the old, yet there is
>> still a huge pool of people using the old software because of that old
>> software's "first-to-market" advantage.
>
> A flaw in the analogy: everyone hates and wants to dump CVS.  People
> will inevitably move on to something better, there's just this huge
> latency in the installed base.
>
> In contrast, the Unix-only crowd doesn't have much reason to drop
> Autoconf / Automake.  They'd like their build times to be faster, but
> that's not enough to pull them away from the old comfortable drill.

You have to distinguish between Unix users (who I agree are quite
comfortable with "./configure; make; make install") and Unix developers.  I
count myself a Unix developer, and using autotools was not comfortable at
all for me although I used it to create and extend build systems for
projects for years.  Even though I was probably the second-most expert at
autotools for PLplot I really disliked the syntax of m4, and the slowness of
libtool (which if you are not aware actually is an 8000 (!) line bash script
to compile and link).  Also, our project through some bumpy autoconf and
libtool transitions with apparently more to come.  We just plain ran into
autotools troubles too many times to be ever comfortable with it, and I just
basically was pretty fed up with autotools as a result and more than ready
for something different.  That's just my own Unix developer experience with
autotools, but I suspect there are lots more out there like me.

>
> The projects that see CMake as a slam dunk, are the ones that did an
> Autoconf build for the Unix stuff, and also had to maintain some
> horrible hand rolled Visual Studio build, typically with .BAT files....

Plplot did have an independent windows build which was difficult to
maintain, and therefore I thought CMake might work out very well for our
windows developers (which it did).  However, that was just gravy and never
anything to do with my own "anything but autotools" personal motivation
since I have never used windows.

> They get sick of the pain that the Free Software Foundation is
> deliberately causing them.

Hmm. I guess that opinion feels right in your universe, but it should be
answered. Newsflash!  The FSF has never caused me pain... :-)

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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