Re: build systems

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi,

daniel g. siegel wrote:

<snip>

> please understand, i dont want to bring up a "autotools is bad and it
> should die"-thread, i just want to use my time to code and not to use
> that time and effort on a build system. i also know, that i have stabbed
> into a beehive, so please be kind lets keep this discussion objective
> and realistic.

Over at OpenWengo, we switched to CMake last year, and have not
regretted it. There are some missing things (like an easy way to find
the version of a library installed and set a minimum version
dependency), but for the most part it's fast, transparently regenerated
makefiles when needed when you run make, and compared to scons (which
was used before) makes recompile time vastly smaller. It generates make
files, nmake files, Visual Studio project files and more.

That said, there is one concern which trumps all others when choosing a
build system: how easy is it for someone with a plain vanilla
distribution to compile & install your software? ./configure && make &&
make install is about as hard as it can be. any harder, and your barrier
to entry is too high. That includes "cd build; cmake ..; make; make
install;" (at least until it becomes ubiquitous). How does toc2 fare on
this level? autoconf/automake are hard for the software developer,
because the goal is to make it easy for the software builder. The
trade-off pays off in community size, testers, developers and
translators down the line.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org