[CMake] autoconf and cmake

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Wojciech Jarosz wrote:
> I've been looking through other projects that use CMake in order to
> learn more. I've seen that some (Chicken, Scribus, for example) seem
> to have configure.in files in addition to CMakeList.txt files. I was
> wondering why one would use both autoconf and CMake in the same
> project?

Legacy support.  I'd love to banish Autoconf entirely, but that's not 
politically doable yet.  CMake still hasn't proven that it does 
everything right.  For instance, right now I'm looking through the CMake 
archives about some kind of ld.so.conf issue on Linux.  Apparently 
Autoconf does something automagically with library paths that CMake 
doesn't, and we need to do something additional on CMake.  When you have 
an installed base that's using Autoconf, it takes a long time to migrate 
people to something new.  People slowly poke at the new stuff 
eventually, and when it works better than the new stuff, people 
gradually switch.  When it works the same, they don't tend to move on, 
they stick with what they know.  And when the new stuff breaks, as 
inevitably happens with a new build system, they don't bother checking 
again for many months.

On the bright side, the other day CMake worked and Autoconf didn't, for 
some Linux build.  That's progress.  Means the breakage is occurring in 
the correct place.  ;-)


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every