Fwd: [CMake] Adding cross-compiler support to CMake ... (fwd)

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Arjen Markus wrote:
>> Michael Casadevall wrote:
>>     
>>>> My intent here is not to start a flamewar between autotools and
>>>> cmake, In some cases, autotools is the proper tool vs cmake due to
>>>> cross-compiling (which will hopefully fixed) and the fact that you
>>>> need the cmake executable to build any CMake package. autotools
>>>> configure script merely needs a shell interpreter,
>>>>         
>> What do you mean "merely" needs a shell interpreter?  For a fair chunk
>> of embedded devices out there, that's tantamount to saying that the
>> Titanic "merely" needs to pull into port.  There are 3 cases for
>> embedded devices:
>>
>> - systems with a Bourne shell and ccmake available
>> - systems with a Bourne shell available
>> - systems without any kind of shell, or really any kind of resources
>>
>> Yes, Autoconf has more cross-compilation reach than CMake at present,
>> but it hardly covers everything.
>>
>>     
>
> Don't forget all those PCs with Windows installed but no Cygwin or MingW:
> they simply can not use the configure scripts. Of course, one can require
> these users to install Cygwin or MingW, but what is that different from
> installing CMake?
>   

The level of pain.  Cygwin is easy.  It just takes a lot more MB of 
downloads to have a working system, than to grab CMake.  Or, uh, you can 
grab the CMake that's in Cygwin.  :-)

MinGW / MSYS has become *awful* if you're trying to get Autoconf going.  
I spent an entire day on it recently and almost gave up.  The only thing 
that saved my ass was a rogue 3rd party project called mingw-install.  
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install  It *nukes* the whole MSYS 
mess and puts in a bunch of stuff that actually works, with the most 
current versions of Autoconf and whatnot.  There's a whole pile of 
integration issues that MSYS hasn't dealt with, they're too lazy.  
They're laboring under the delusion that their MinGWPort stuff actually 
works, when in fact it's quite broken.  I don't have time to rag on them 
on their mailing list about it.  I just use mingw-install and sing its 
praises.  Better comment out those "rm -r" lines though!  Everything 
worked fine once I dropped my own compiler in afterwards.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

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