[CMake] Creating CMakeLists files from Solutions, Projects and Makefiles

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 07.12.10 23:52:10, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 07.12.10 13:14:19, Paul Dean wrote:
> > 
> > I've been using CMAKE for a few years now and I absolutley LOVE it. 
> > It makes my life as a programmer so much easier to be able to generate project files on any platform.
> >  
> > What hurts is doing the reverse.  I can't count how many hours I've spent converting Solutions, Projects and Makefiles into CmakeLists files.  
> >  
> > I think if CMAKE could generate CMakeLists files from Solutions, Projects and Makefiles, it would be the ULTIMATE make system.
> > Just think. Any time you run into some sorcecode that does not have a CMakeFile, you could generate it from the Makefile or Project.
> >  
> > I can't imagine any programmer that would not love that ability.  I think it would be something great to add to CMAKE.
> > What are everyones thoughts on that?   
> 
> See my answer to John, basically I doubt this is actually possible,
> except for very static project-files like may VS solutions are. For
> Makefile's or other build-tools like qmake its not going to work as they
> allow arbitrary commands to be executed at any point. You may be able to
> convert the files on a syntactic level, but that doesn't guarantee you
> they're semantically equivalent. And I bet in most cases (except very
> trivial ones) the generated CMake files will look very un-cmake'ish.
> 
> Not to mention configure-scripts written in some shell-language or as
> C++ app...
> 
> Also whats the point of being able to generate cmake files from "any"
> project files? If I just want to build the project then I can just as
> well use the existing buildsystem to build. Why bother installing cmake,
> if VS is already installed and the project has a solution file?
> 
> If you want to port a project to cmake, you'll probably also end up
> restructuring some things wrt. the buildsystem, so a human needs to do
> the conversion anyway (and automatic conversion will be ugly, see
> above).
> 
> This is similar to automatic translation of languages. Yes todays tools
> that do this are good enough so that you can get the meaning of a text
> for many cases. But they're still not good enough to match what a native
> speaker would've written or to be able to translate any arbitrary text
> (especially 'slang', scientific texts etc. are causing problems for such
> tools).

PS: All the above doesn't mean I think conversion-tools are totally
useless. In fact the automake-to-cmake tool I think is very useful to
get a basic skeleton cmake project up in no time. That way one can
concentrate on the 'real work', i.e. porting the library/feature checks
and making sure that includes and link-libs are set up correctly.

Andreas

-- 
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.