[CMake] improve the CMake language?

[Brandon Van Every]

On Nov 1, 2007 11:40 PM, Sanchez, Juan <juan.sanchez at amd.com> wrote:
>
>  Tcl is a simple language, and is well understood.  It has already been
> ported to about every platform out there.  You don't need QT or wxWidgets,
> because the Tk extensions of it already work.

Tcl's popularity is also on the wane.  I don't think hitching CMake's
post to Tcl is a good marketing idea.  I'd pick Ruby, for the regex
support.  Hey it's better 'n' Perl 6.  :-)

>  Many features in the CMake language don't really work the way people
> expect, or are not documented, or both.

I agree that much can be improved about the documentation.  I'd like
to note, however, that some improvements are happening in CVS right
now.  Enough to make me think that Kitware does take documentation
seriously and that strategically, documentation problems are going to
be addressed.  I've given a lot of gloom and doom about documentation,
that if the status quo is maintained, in 3 years' time CMake will
start to lose customers as other build systems catch up in technical
capability.  But I do think 3 years is the level of urgency of the
problem.  We'd all like things right this second, but open source has
its resource limitations.  Recently I suggested organizing Google
Summer Of Code projects to address such things.

>  If anyone would like to fork cmake with me, I'm game.
>
>  Features:
>
>  Tcl frontend featuring modern dynamic language constructs and consistent
> syntax.
>
>  C pre-processor based dependency scanner
>
>  Accurate and up to date documentation
>
>  Focus on getting build system that works, because all of the language
> constructs have already been written.
>
>  Developers who are not hostile to ideas concerning improvements to the
> language.

To make real improvements in all of those areas, you'd need a lot of
funding.  What kind of mandate do you have?  There's not much point in
saying "everything's gonna be better" if you don't have the labor.

Second question, if you do have serious development resources at your
disposal: what improvements in CMake would cause you to stick around
rather than going your own way?  Is a position of compromise possible?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every