[CMake] What does `cross-platform' mean?

[Jed Brown]

On Fri 2008-11-07 11:32, Mike Arthur wrote:
> I've used CMake on Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, Windows XP, 
> Windows Vista, OSX 10.4, OSX 10.5 and custom-rolled Linux distributions. I've 
> used it across four architectures and four compilers. I've introduced it into 
> two companies I've worked for and use it in my spare-time KDE development.

It sounds like these all satisfy the predicate that you have shared libs
and you only have one version of each package installed (or you're
trying to find the version in the standard location).

> That's not to say they don't exist but I think you're doing the classic 
> software engineer thing (that I've been guilty of more than a few times) of 
> assuming your specific circumstances are the norm and that if you have any 
> problems then the application is broken for everyone else. This simply isn't 
> the case. I haven't seen any of this "widespread brokenness" you claim.
> 
> You seem to say that CMake doesn't work nicely for a specific use-case you have 
> and it may not but there's no need to basically troll the whole project 
> because of shortcomings in a niche environment.
> 
> CMake may not be perfect but it's the best damned cross-platform build system 
> I've seen for C/C++ by a _long_ way.

I really don't intend to bash CMake.  *I* like it much better than the
alternatives, but I'm trying to convince others and it's hard for me to
sell CMake while finding that many modules (most of which I don't
actually care about) are systematically broken in niche environments
which are disproportionately popular on clusters, an important
demographic for my projects.

Jed
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