LCA: Disintermediating distributions

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 20:50 UTC (Wed) by asamardzic (guest, #27161)
In reply to: LCA: Disintermediating distributions by aleXXX
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Beside portability that there are enough other reasons to switch from autotools to something easier to use. I know there are gurus which understand autotools, but my impression is that the big majority of Linux developers doesn't really understand it.

I can only second that. I consider myself rather experienced, developing mostly for Unix, both my open-source projects and at my work, for number of years and heavily using autotools during the first time; still, I was never able to confidently accomplish anything more complicated with it, for example to create my own set of macros to find given library or package. Discovering CMake, while it certainly has its own set of quirks, was like nirvana for me - I was finally able to properly understand my build system, I was able to read generated makefiles, and - yes, I was able to write modules (in CMake terminology) for finding other stuff on the system without any problem.

So, while I couldn't care less about Windows portability (well, at least for my open-source work), I really couldn't find call for some kind of uniting around autotools (if I understood that part of the arcticle properly) compelling.

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We're in the process of switching over to CMake for the Second Life viewer, and from what
we've seen so far, it looks great.  When you have a lot of Windows and Mac programmers on your
team, it's a huge win for those people to be able to use the dev tools they are used to (e.g.
Visual Studio and XCode). The fact that CMake generates build files for those and a lot more
is a pretty unique characteristic among build systems.