[CMake] Effort to create a new generator (tup)

[Jed Brown]

On Wed, 05 May 2010 16:08:14 -0400, Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com> wrote:
> Not sure yet, perhaps none of it.  It would have to build custom 
> commands and targets.   Basically, support for code generators like 
> swig/moc/lex/yacc.  I guess the auto-depend stuff in tup would work for 
> C/C++, but the Fortran 90 stuff in CMake would not work.

Why not?  Tup's dependency analysis has nothing to do with the source
language.

> CMake is also used to build very large projects like KDE, sounds like
> tup is designed with that in mind, but it would have to handle very
> larger numbers of targets and .o files.

This is where tup will beat make by a huge margin.


Having just experimented with tup recently, test suites are a potential
issue.  As I understand it, tup will always build everything rather than
stopping, for example, with the shared library or a select executable.
It would be a problem if updating the library caused relinking of
thousands of test executables.  Usually I want fast recompilation of the
specific test program I'm working with (even if I'm influencing it's
behavior by editing library code), only once that is worked out will I
want to relink the rest and perhaps run the test suite.

Jed