Re: [Chicken-users] understanding the CMake build

[Thomas Chust]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> [...] I wonder, why would anyone else want to understand the CMake 
> build?  Unless they wanted to extend it, I can't think of a reason. 
>
> [...] CMake online documentation in general is poor.  The mailing list 
> is great, you can get all your questions rapidly answered there, but 
> documentation is definitely a serious shortcoming.

Hello,

to continue the slightly off-topic rant about build systems: Well, I for 
example would be interested in understanding the CMake build simply to 
learn CMake as the idea behind CMake is good and I'd love to use it for my 
own software projects -- but only if it worked.

Not only is the CMake documentation scarce, it also frequently seems to be 
wrong and in the past four weeks I have not managed, even after 
modifications in the CMakeLists.txt files, to get two large CMake powered 
projects, namely CHICKEN and VTK, to build using CMake 2.4.3 on either

   - MacOS X using gcc-3.3
   - MacOS X using gcc-4.0
   - Windows XP Professional using MinGW gcc-3.2 and MSYS
   - Windows XP Professional using MinGW gcc-3.2 without MSYS
   - Windows XP Professional using Open Watcom 1.5

Everytime at least the linker flags are terribly messed up in some 
creative ways I could never devise when writing a Makefile by hand ;-) I'm 
especially amazed how CMake manages to screw up Java compiler and archiver 
flags as the JDK tools are really easy to use and have the same command 
line options on every platform.

Plus I only managed to get one of my own software libraries to build using 
CMake with so many tweaks and tricks in the CMakeLists.txt file that I 
felt the urge to promptly throw away this new build system when I saw that 
the one CMake build control file was by far larger than the hand written 
Makefiles for all the platforms I need to support together!

> [...] Not that people are better off with Autotools.  It's better 
> documented, but the whole toolchain will drive you nuts. [...]

I've not completely given up on CMake, yet, but I'm starting to get 
slightly annoyed and to wonder which platforms this supposedly cross 
platform make tool is working on at all...

Not that the GNU autotools would be any easier to use than CMake, but at 
least every autotools configured build system I have met so far worked out 
of the box on at least one of the platforms mentioned above...

cu,
Thomas