[CMake] Re: VMWare on SCons' future

[Brandon Van Every]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com> wrote:
> VMWare is a large commercial project.
>  http://www.nabble.com/SCons-Future-Directions-and-Thoughts-td15176258.html

My impression so far is that SCons appeals to a company that wants to
program a customized build system, rather than have one off-the-shelf
that already works.  A customized build system requires dedicated
manpower and exotic needs.  VMWare has those needs; it has been
pointed out that many other companies do not have such needs, nor
dedicated full-time in-house build guru expertise.  Also, when the
build system is programmable, people seem to start treating it as a
library rather than an end user tool.  There's talk of refining SCons
into different engines and layers and so forth.  These could all be
strategic reasons to avoid offering general programmability.  Perhaps
most of the customers really don't want it.

What Would Microsoft Do?  They'd wait for someone else to do the R&D,
then clone it.  Perhaps it's better to let companies customize to
their hearts' content in SCons, figure out the build feature they
really need (like "a programmable dependency graph" in the case of
VMWare), then provide some feature in CMake that answers that specific
need.

I am starting to wonder if the whole Lua thing is indeed a red
herring, and what CMake really needs is the best possible website to
document, tutorialize, and market CMake.  In other words, what we've
got is fine; go sell it.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every