[CMake] Gyp VS CMake

[Bill Hoffman]

On 2/17/2011 8:29 AM, Nicolas Desprès wrote:
> 2011/2/17 John Drescher<drescherjm at gmail.com>:
>>> But we are going off topic. The main point in my post was to trigger
>>> discussion about how we could improve CMake, so that Gyp's
>>> developers/users could use it.
>>>
>>
>> I think one of their main points was to generate standalone projects
>> that do not require CMake to build.
>
> Yes. As mentioned in point 5.
>
This will never happen with CMake.  CMake will always be required to be 
on the machine doing the build.   There is just no other way to do 
system introspection.  Also, if you don't have something like CMake 
around it is hard to write cross platform build files that are complex 
in anyway (i.e. needs to copy files at build time).

So, if you remove try-compile, and all system introspection, 
find_program, find_library, etc, etc.  Also remove the ability to 
compute depends in makefiles.  If you took all those features away from 
CMake, you would be left with Gyp.

So, there is a trade off with CMake, you have to install CMake on a 
machine to use CMake.  But, for complicated projects that depend on 
external libraries and have custom build steps, there really is no way 
around that.

-Bill


-- 
Bill Hoffman
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