Re: [Chicken-users] CMake tarballs

[John Cowan]

Toby Butzon scripsit:

> I, for one, am not interested in making Chicken even more obscure by
> requiring an obscure build tool. On *every* platform except non-Cygwin,
> non-MSYS, straight Windows, autotools does the job just fine.

Autotools is a pair of kludges piled on a kludge.  And Windows is not
an obscure and insignificant platform.

> IMHO, one platform -- for which two viable workarounds exist -- should not
> drive a shift that will require everyone else -- those that *have* been
> able to build up to this point, just by typing ./configure; make; make
> install -- to go out and get some newfangled "installer" for the same job.

You get cmake *once* -- as simple as "apt-get cmake" or "yum
cmake" or your local equivalent.   At worst, you download it from
http://www.cmake.org and do "./bootstrap; make; make install".  After
that, building with CMake is "cmake; make; make install", which is *not*
more difficult.

> Exactly. Why would I want to install CMake so I can build on a system
> that actually allows me to have a real build environment.  Autotools by
> design doesn't have to be installed... it generates a shell script and
> makefiles that work anywhere with a reasonable development environment.

That turns out not to be the case.

In fact, I just had to install autoconf and automake on my Solaris test
system in order to be able to build the darcs head.  (I skipped installing
darcs itself by doing a "darcs pull" on a system -- a Windows system --
that does have darcs and then tarring up the result.)  Luckily, someone
had already installed gcc and GNU make already, so I didn't have to go
through all that just starting from the native Solaris toolchain.

For that matter, the native Solaris make will accept the Makefile
constructed by CMake, but not the one constructed by autotools.)

> Don't get me wrong. Having a CMake build can be nothing but an asset.
> But pushing so hard for it to be the official way to build is too much.

The *only* reason that I'm not pushing as hard as I can to make CMake
the regular build process *right now* is that it doesn't build properly
on Cygwin, which is my chosen environment.

Why?  Because it's measurably faster to build, easier to understand,
and much easier to maintain.  It's just a better build system.

-- 
John Cowan    http://ccil.org/~cowan    address@hidden
SAXParserFactory [is] a hideous, evil monstrosity of a class that should
be hung, shot, beheaded, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake,
buried in unconsecrated ground, dug up, cremated, and the ashes tossed
in the Tiber while the complete cast of Wicked sings "Ding dong, the
witch is dead."  --Elliotte Rusty Harold on xml-dev