Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:09:57PM -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> expect to see third-party flavors of CMake (the way you see various  
>> vendor versions of e.g. sed, which have no relation to each other  
>> besides the degree to which they implement the POSIX spec for such tool).
> 
> Why so? There could be a solaris cmake, an IRIX cmake, an HP-UX cmake...
> 
> There could be. Why are there vendor sh, sed and awk?

Because they predate GNU? Such tools existed before GNU, therefore each 
vendor had to roll their own, as a result of which there are GNU, BSD, 
vendor-specific, etc. versions of each, and because there were already, 
there is a certain inertia in maintaining them.

Instead of asking "why not", ask *why*. I haven't heard of 
vendor-specific autotools; what makes you think vendors will suddenly 
roll their own CMake?

>> Cost of porting CMake: on POSIX platforms, about the same as autotools  
>> or better, and unlike autotools, doable for non-UNIX-like platforms.
> 
> All the GNU POSIX utilities are portable and have been ported on many
> platforms. 

Sorry, but there really is not a "nice" port of bash to Windows. And the 
mingw project should tell you something about the difficulty of porting 
POSIX tools to non-POSIX platforms (i.e. that you have to bootstrap 
something like a POSIX libc before you can even start).

At *worst* you'd have to do something similar for CMake. In reality, 
CMake doesn't have that problem because it doesn't need to look like 
POSIX, it just needs to look like CMake, which means it can adapt much 
more readily to the native environment.

Autotools *needs* a POSIX environment, which means on non-POSIX 
platforms you have to bring along all that baggage. On the plus side, 
your application code doesn't have to be as portable, but you don't have 
the *ability* to build native applications on some platforms (e.g. 
Windows). CMake itself doesn't need all that, so it's only needed (and 
even then, only the runtime, not all the supporting programs) if the 
application needs it.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
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