[CMake] A configure script solution

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Tuesday 24 June 2008, J wrote:
> Greetings all!
>
> I've been sold on cmake. From what I gather, it's hands down better than
> automake and family. However, I do have a problem with not having a
> configure script.
>
> A couple of the main benefits of having a configure script are letting
> the user/package maintainer choose portions of a project to compile or
> exclude from compilation, as well as choosing alternate locations for
> libraries/includes/installations, both of which are rather important.
>
> Without a configure script all package maintainers for red hat/fedora,
> debian/ubuntu, etc will have to learn all the ins and outs of cmake and
> spend oodles of time setting variables and passing -D switches to cmake.
>
> So my question to everyone is, is there already a replacement configure
> system/script that mimics or replaces the configure scripts created by
> autotools?
>
> The KDE folks wrote a very simple configure script by hand it seems,
> which replaces rudimentary options such as --libdir and such, which is a

No we didn't:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/configure?revision=733258&view=markup

This script is called "configure", and what it does is tell the user that 
there is no configure script, but instead he has to use cmake.
Additionally it translates a few configure arguments to cmake and prints them 
to stdout.
It does not try to behave like configure, it explicitely informs the user how 
to use cmake.

Alex