[Chicken-hackers] CMake vs. Autoconf

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Ivan Raikov wrote:
>   
>   I see. Thanks for the explanation, John! Well, I have added the
> Debian files to the dist target in Makefile.am (it was a trivial
> change), and I will be more than happy to make the necessary additions
> to the CMake build file. I don't mind working with whatever is the
> currently favored build tool. By the way, I am curious what was the
> problem with using Autoconf/Automake under MinGW? 

It sucked.  Wasn't just Autoconf; a year ago, Chicken's support of MinGW 
posix libraries and Windows pathnames was basically broken.  I came onto 
the scene, doing my usual drill of trying to get things to work, and 
noticing that the Autoconf build sucked.  Refreshingly, Felix actually 
agreed that it sucked, and said if he could do it over with something 
else, he would.  So I took the bait and did.  There were 3 different 
build systems originally: Autoconf, nmake, and a handcrafted .bat file.  
The latter 2 were for MSVC alone.  CMake offered the possibility of just 
1 build system for all platforms, something Autoconf cannot do, and 
because of the FSF's politics, will never do.  So for awhile we had 4 
build systems, while I was hammering out the new CMake build, and we 
were hammering the pathname stuff into shape.  Eventually we got it down 
to 2.  We'll need another 6..12 months "in the field" before we're ready 
to go with just 1.


> I ported a fairly
> complex distributed computing toolkit to MinGW last month, and the
> only GNU-related problem I saw was that libtool somehow gets confused
> when the source directory includes spaces (like "Documents and
> Settings"). In fact, I was pleasantly surprised how painless things
> were.
>   

"The only?"  That kind of whitespace problem consumed a few months of 
our time, and I'm still not certain the beast is slain.  Handling 
different pathname conventions on different shells is a nightmare.  I'm 
curious, did your project also handle straight Windows Command Prompt?  
or MSVC builds?  If you stay in a Unix-insulated universe where 
pathnames are always forward slash, your job is a helluva lot easier.

I've also had problems with MSYS's support of Autoconf.  At times, that 
has sucked as well.  Enough that I dumped the standard MSYS package and 
went with mingw-install.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every