Author: Douglas Huff 2011-07-02 17:45:02
Published on: 2011-07-02T17:45:02+00:00
In an email conversation, John Smith suggested the idea of native build script generation for other platforms. He claimed that autotools can only generate makefiles, which is quite limited. However, Douglas Huff pointed out that gmake builds/runs almost everywhere. John Smith then expressed his preference for cmake over autotools, citing its simplicity and elegance. Although he acknowledged that cmake isn't perfect, he believes it's a leap forward compared to autotools, which is difficult to debug. Douglas Huff countered that autotools is more ubiquitous and understood by a wider audience than cmake. He also criticized the need for a GUI like "ccmake" in cmake to select build options instead of proper help output in the command line interface. While acknowledging that cmake should not be rejected outright if one is willing to set up and maintain a build environment, he believed that speculating about it without an implementation to compare seems pointless. With regards to implementing an auto-configuration tool for the build environment, jaromil had already done the tedious work of rearranging the source tree to make adding any such tools easy to drop in place. The autotools setup he created works mostly but needs tweaking and some changes to catch up and rebase.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T19:04:15.686326+00:00