[CMake] CPack 101

[Raymond Wan]

Hi Mike and all,


On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 21:58, Mike McQuaid <mike at mikemcquaid.com> wrote:
> On 23 December 2010 12:43, David Cole <david.cole at kitware.com> wrote:
> I think the main problem is that you make it very hard for people to
> contribute. KDE and Homebrew (two other open-source projects I've
> written a lot of code for over the years) make this very easy.
>
> Kitware is great, you clearly write good code and have done a great
> job creating CMake and CPack. They are fantastic tools. However, I
> think until you are more encouraging of external developers you will
> struggle to make huge improvements to CMake.


As only a casual user of CMake, I'm hesitant to enter this kind of
thread, but a comment like the above is difficult to ignore.  :-)

IMHO, the comparison between KDE and CMake is a bit unfair.  KDE is
visible to many people, both developers and users, while CMake is
known by only developers.  Also, it is known that CMake is developed
by Kitware; this is quite different from KDE which relies on a very
large international community.  So, combining these two reasons, it is
not so surprising that the management of how KDE is developed is more
advanced.

Yes, they are both open-source, but two software can be both
open-source but still be run differently.  It isn't necessary for one
open-source software to be managed similar to another one.  And I
think (without knowing the actual numbers) that the code to KDE is
larger than CMake?

Personally, the help I've seen on this mailing list and in the mailing
list archives is great and while there may be room for improvement, I
guess it can happen in time.



> The mailing list is OK but most people don't want to sign up to a
> mailing list and receive lots of emails that have nothing to do with
> them. I'm only signed up because I want to try and get some patches
> merged and was told that I should discuss things here rather than the
> bugtracker.
>
> I hope I don't cause any offense here either. I'm passionate about
> CMake because I like the tool and want to make it better.


Someone else has talked about using Google on the archives.

An often ignored point is that thanks to Google, you can "contribute"
to the documentation just by writing a web page.  If it is useful and
gets linked by others, etc., then the right keywords will make your
web page appear on the first page of Google's results.  Some of the
help I've got on CMake, CPack, etc. are on non-cmake pages, actually.
Of course, if these pages are wrong, then the error propagates...  But
if it is useful, I guess Kitware developers will be happy to include
it in the Wiki at least?

Ray