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Seems like I wasn’t the only one…

… not understanding KDE’s move to CMake as build system. I’ve been using it quite a bit now, for rubytag++ and ruby-hunspell, the first because I wanted to try CMake, the latter because both Ruby and Hunspell work on Windows and I wanted them tow ork there, and after all a Ruby extension is a quite simple thing.

Luca voiced his concern about the improper usage of CMake that is being done out there. I think the main issue is that up to now, CMake was being used only by a couple of minimal projects (like my extensions) and by the Work-In-Progress KDE4 development, both of which have not much public so might not show their problems. I think this is the main issue with alternative build systems, you might like them when they are used for special things or in-development things, but when they hit mainstream the problems surface quickly. The software that caused the stir now is Debian’s cdrkit, the cdrecord fork.

Now, not only I agree with all of Luca’s points, but I’d like also to add that I feel CMake maintainers (that’s Kitware, a company) cares not that much about other uses of their software than the ones they are paid for. I’ve submitted a new FindRuby module to fix their own that’s just crap in the literal sense (it hardcodes i386-linux path for Ruby), but no comment from them up to now, even if also KDE developers have their own FindRuby module.

Finally, more I use CMake, more I feel nostalgic for autoconf’s M4 macros; at least there you separate the parameters with something (the command) rather than with whitespaces and naming conventions.

So, I’ll repeat my “autotools forever” cry now and always. CMake is not a good replacement; it’s not a replacement at all.

Comments 2
  1. Wow, that’s like the most annoying bug tracking system I’ve ever seen :p. Want to talk with whoever put whatever response on there.. no you can’t just look, you have to register and login :P. What the heck :p.

  2. I’m curious what resources you used to learn autotools. I’ve been watching your work for a while, and you appear to be very good with them.I’ve looked for some resources, but I haven’t found any that worked for me. If you have any good places to look, I’d appreciate if you send them my way.Thanks for all the hard work on gentoo!

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