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cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 4, 2006 20:35 UTC (Mon) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

And another CMake convert :-)
It seems CMake (http://www.cmake.org) is really starting to get
momentum.
When I once built cdrtools myself, I also wondered why for every tool
there was a special Schilling edition, like "smake" and others...

Alex

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Sep 4, 2006 23:02 UTC (Mon) by moxfyre (subscriber, #13847) [Link]

I've never bothered to learn autotools fully since it's so complicated, and I can mostly just edit existing files to get what I want.

How steep is the learning curve on cmake? Can I learn the basics in an hour or two?

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 5, 2006 1:38 UTC (Tue) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link]

Can I learn the basics in an hour or two?

Yes, absolutely. There was an article in Linux Magazine recently (disclaimer, free registration apparently required, and I'm the author of the article) about how to use CMake as well one here at LWN too. It's very simple to get started using it.

CMake

Posted Sep 5, 2006 2:14 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

And rightly so - it's great. I work on a project that presently supports CMake and autohell in parallel (we're dropping autohell as soon as current CMake unstable gets a stable release) and the relative ease of maintainance is significant. Whenever we want to change anything significant or add any feature to the build system it goes from significant to amazing - CMake rocks.

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Sep 5, 2006 6:32 UTC (Tue) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link]

After completing porting several small- and medium-scale projects from auto-tools to cmake, I can only confirm that (in my experience) cmake rocks indeed. Simple and consistent language made it possible for me to easily write feature testing macros, I was never able to figure out how to properly accomplish this with autoconf. The only slight problem is lack of complete documentation, I guess for projects with complicated setups one would have to order "Mastering CMake" book to get most from the tool. But this seems like fair game to me (mine copy of book is on its way), and on the other side cmake developers (and users too) are *very* responsive on cmake mailing list, so for lots of questions one could get the clarification this way.

cdrkit without cmake

Posted May 24, 2009 4:59 UTC (Sun) by solardiz (guest, #35993) [Link]

We wanted to introduce cdrkit into Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl), a small distro for servers, and we finally did, but we found the build-time dependency on cmake very unfortunate. So we got rid of that dependency in our package, but this cost us time. For more info, see my posting to the Distributions list and our cdrkit package files, including README-cmakeless.

We find cdrkit's use of cmake unreasonable. cdrkit is relatively small (e.g., compared to cmake!) and it does not require "portability" to native development environments on non-Unix platforms (where the use of cmake could be an advantage). cdrkit is simply bloated by its use of cmake. :-(

cdrkit without cmake

Posted May 29, 2009 20:16 UTC (Fri) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

You can consider cmake a tool like make and the compiler, i.e. something
which should already be existing on the system.
On most systems this is now already the case.

On basically all desktop distros this is the case now, and more and more
other programs are converting to cmake. So maybe cdrkit is the first
program you are encountering now which uses cmake for your distro, but
there will be more in the future.

If you want to avoid the build time, you can also use the binary cmake
release which you can download here:
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html
It works on all Linux distributions (at least we don't know of any where
it doesn't).
This still adds size, but you can save the build time for cmake.

Alex

cdrkit without cmake

Posted Jun 2, 2009 12:58 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The build time for cmake is about five minutes :)

I suspect what's annoying people is that the syntax for cmake is quite
different from configure scripts, and it takes a good bit of manual
reading to figure out how to get a list of per-package compilation options
et al (cmake --help doesn't work for that as far as I can tell: you can
get lists of *all* properties or commands, but not only of those added byt
the thing you're trying to build. I have to resort to reading the
cmakefiles, which is not ideal!)

cdrkit: Debian's fork of cdrtools

Posted Aug 18, 2009 8:55 UTC (Tue) by schily (guest, #60311) [Link]

>And another CMake convert :-)
>It seems CMake (http://www.cmake.org) is really starting to get
>momentum.

Cmake is no make program but just another cryptic way of doing
things the outdated way. When it was written first, the Schily makefile
system did already exist for 8 years.

Cmake is just an autoconf replacement - not a new program
like David Korn's "nmake". Cmake is no make program but a makefile
generator - you still need a working make program in order
to compile.....

Cmake creates extremely cryptic makefiles, that are hard to debug.

Cmake does not create a multi platform build environment,
so it is the same fetch - unpack - configure - compile - install - throw away idea as vanilla autoconf.

I see no advantage before the Schily makefile system.

>When I once built cdrtools myself, I also wondered why for every tool
>there was a special Schilling edition, like "smake" and others...

I wonder why some people wrote programs like "gmake" although smake
existed for years already...smake is highly portable (more portable
than gmake) and smake is definitely needed for some of the supported
platforms where gmake is too buggy.

BTW: I recommend to use the official and well maintained cdrtools
instead of the questionable fork that is unmaintained since more
than two years and that is based on an extremely outdated cdrtools
source.