Re: Using vala in GNOME

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi,

Johan Dahlin wrote:
> CMake *is* considerably better. Xcode/VisualStudio are killer features
> which alone would make a switch worth it.

As one of the (few?) people around here who's been involved in a project
which used CMake as a build system (OpenWengo), I have a little more to
add than this.

Indeed, for a cross-platform project, CMake is great, it generates a
variety of build scripts.

However, in my experience it had one major weakness on Linux systems -
it had no means of versioning library dependencies (apart from those
using pkgconfig, with a custom CMake module). Given that lots of
different distributions and build environments exist in Linux, this was
one of the things I quite liked in autotools - even if it was a bit
hacky at times.

One guy working on the team got so sick of copying & pasting the same
thing everywhere that he even wrote his own system of macros:
http://dev.openwengo.org/trac/openwengo/trac.fcgi/wiki/OWBuild to
provide things like "inheritance" of libraries and linker flags.

I'm not saying that any of this is fatal, but perhaps the grass is
greener, and a little more reflection is required (as Johan suggested,
seeing what went well & badly with KDE's migration would be a good start).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org