[gpsd-dev] cmake: (was: Re: [PATCH]: Link Python extensions with libpython - attempt 3)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Greg Troxel <address@hidden>:
> I wonder (a tiny bit) about switching to cmake

I took a hard look at cmake when I was working on Battle For Wesnoth and 
it became clear than autotools was too horrible to live with.  I was
also evaluating waf and SCons at the time

There are a bunch of minor problems with cmake.  It's what I think of
as a German-style design, which is to say careful and precisely
engineered and well documented - but also fussy, overcomplex, and if
you wander outside the use cases the designers imagined you are
*doomed*.

Like autotools and unlike Scons and waf, cmake is a two-level system.
cmake recipes generate makefiles rather than being directly
interpreted as build instructions.

This was the showstopper.  Two-level build recipes are a stone bitch
to debug, because the breakage happens in generated code which does
not necessarily have any obvious relationship to whatever part
of your recipe was actually wrong. 

Overall I'd call cmake a thoughtful implementation of a design concept
(build by cleverly generated makefiles) that is fundamentally wrong and
should die with autotoools.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

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