CMake!

[Braden McDaniel]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 15:56 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
>> On Oct 10, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Callum Lerwick wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 11:31 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>>> If the state of the art has advanced and there's a tool that can
>>>> replace libtool so a developer can say "I want a shared library"  
>>>> and the
>>>> tool builds it on all platforms then we could look into getting
>>>> upstreams to switch but simply getting rid of libtool in favour of
>>>> handcoding Makefiles to build shared libraries is a step in the wrong
>>>> direction.
>>> CMake! Catch the wave!
>>>
>>> http://www.cmake.org/
>> Um, no. That's not what he asked for.
>>
>> If you want upstream to stop using libtool altogether, find a suitable  
>> replacement and convince the Automake developers to use it instead.
> 
> Why the h8? He was speaking in the context of "the state of the art" and
> in my oh-so-humble opinion CMake is it.

No, he was speaking in terms of something that could replace libtool 
upstream in (presumably some relatively high percentage of) 300 
packages. And CMake is so, *so* not it. I don't know if anything is 
"it". But the notion that Fedora is going to get ~300 upstream projects 
to make wholesale changes to their build systems is profoundly detached 
from reality.

> The whole of the Autotools stack
> is very much... not.

Maybe. But a tool that is less extensible than them is likely to be 
perceived as a step in the wrong direction by a fair number of build 
system maintainers.

> Last I checked I was just some random guy on the
> internet who has sadly not been granted the power to force anyone to do
> anything.

You have the power to affect the signal-to-noise ratio. Please use it 
wisely.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                      e-mail: <braden at endoframe.com>
<http://endoframe.com>               Jabber: <braden at jabber.org>