[CMake] improve the CMake language?

[Juan E. Sanchez]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> 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?


This would be a community effort.  I don't have the resources to 
strike out on my own.  I like using cmake.  The language is kind of a 
bitter pill for people in my organization to swallow.

The most important item on my proposed feature list is the Tcl 
frontend.

Juan



>
>
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
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>
>

Juan Sanchez
Juan.Sanchez at amd.com
800-538-8450 Ext. 54395
512-602-4395