[CMake] CMake IR

[Raymond Wan]

Hi Máté,


On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Nagy-Egri Máté Ferenc <cmake at cmake.org> wrote:
> I wanted to ask your opinion on something that has been troubling me since…
> well, ever since I started using CMake. I have not found a single person
> alive who would have said:
>
> “The script language of CMake is nice, intuitive and productive. Authoring
> scripts is easy, and writing custom macros is not difficult either.”


I'm not much of an expert wih CMake but when someone says "I have not
found a single person alive...", I would usually counter by asking how
many people you've asked?  :-)


> Initial feedback in my vicinity was favorable, even those with zealous CMake
> opposition aggreed this were something awesome to pull off (though they
> expressed their disbelief in Kitware and the community approving such a
> radical change). This mail along with the document only intends to get the
> ball rolling and hopefully manifest in something similar, starting with
> CMake 4.0 perhaps.


I for one am quite happy with CMake.  We can point fingers at
technology (i.e., which programming language is better or worse), but
in the end, it's really the community support (IMHO).  And if I'm
stuck with CMake, I can usually find answers to most of my problems on
this e-mail list or by searching Google.

If you want to refactor CMake along these lines:

> There are gazillions of scripting languages one could have chosen for
> CMake (Python, Perl, Ruby, Powershell, Bash, etc.)

I have a question for you.  Why introduce them as CMake 4.0?  Why not
start a new project from scratch and give it a new name.  Why "take
over" the name of an already working tool?  I mean, it's like
complaining about Perl (apologies to Perl lovers...just an example!)
and wanting to rewrite it from scratch.  Up to a point, it is better
to come up with new name...if you think you can do it better.

I honestly don't think CMake is broken.  Perhaps it's because I came
from Makefiles and then Autotools -- the latter was a nightmare!
Perhaps one possible improvement to CMake might be to improve the
documentation a bit so that maybe there's more information on how to
*write* modules (as opposed to using modules).

Ray