Re: build systems

[Hubert Figuiere <hub figuiere net>]

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 15:40 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> 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.

And in that casse, the requirement for autotools based is very low: only
shell and the compiler + dependencies for said program (no need for the
autotools if you just want to build). While for CMake based build, you
need CMake to be installed first. Worse for CMake, often adding new
features means fixing CMake (the KDE4 developers had to upgrade CMake on
a regular basis, but maybe the madness stopped by now), while for
automake you just provide the macros locally (ok automake seems to break
compatibility making it a PITA to build gtk from SVN on a SuSE for
example, but that's a different problem).

I tried to use CMake last year to be curious, and it failed because of
the lack of documentation. With autotools I discover new tricks every
days, but most of them are just in the documentation that is widely
available (unlike CMake).


Hub