vtkLocal in 15 Easy Steps (was RE: [vtkusers] VTK 4.0 Local?)

[John Washbourne]

"Volpe, Christopher R (CRD)" wrote:
> 
> Well, it's been suggested before, but the kitware folks say it leads to problems where, if the
> directory's recognized by CVS, people will inadvertently check in their own local files.
> 
> For what it's worth, here are my changes 

....

<major snippage on exhaustive and exhasuting directions>


Wow! And *this* is easier than something like "configure
--with-local" ??

I had a brief dialog a week or so ago with William Hoffman about
how cmake and the 4.0 build was broken on my system, and I didnt
like cmake, and in the process of upgrading a 2.x I gave up on
4.0 completely (after spending a fair bit of time) and went with
3.2. The reason I liked the old system was that you could create
a persistent user.make file, and a single command that passed
whatever variables you needed, and use that for incremental
(even nightly) releases.

I think it would be totally cool if someone could engineer some
"hack" to convert the 4.0 setup back to an environment in which
a single user.make file could and a command of the form [env
"FOO=bar" configure --with-kungfu] worked. I have nothing
against cmake because I am sure there are valid reasons for its
use, but it is horribly ugly as far as I am concerned, and the
reason I think it is ugly is that I know enough about a plethora
of languages already that one more is so far down my list of
things to do that it is effectively not possible. I *do not*
mean ugly in the sense that it is kludgey, but ugly in the sense
that it is one more twisty backroad that is hard to travel
without experience or good directions.

My (hopefully) worthwhile suggestion is that Kitware use cmake,
but we have some system for making it more "like it used to be".
So I clearly have the attitude, but lack the skills. If this
list isnt the place for these comments, perhaps I should be
ranting in private communication.

Cheers!

John Washbourne