Re: [Chicken-users] CMake problem on Linux should be solved

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Cowan wrote:

felix winkelmann scripsit:

  

I've put 6 years of my free hacking time into this (nothing else),
and nobody should give a damn about my personal motivations or how
often I get fed up with it, or how it affects my day job.
    

Actually, it does matter to us whether you or Brandon are getting burned
out: it would be a huge job to take over supporting even the CMake build
from zero, 

Actually I don't agree.  I didn't do the "write obscure code so that I remain invaluable" thing, I did rather the opposite.  :-)  The CMake build is currently feature complete, and it's MIT licensed, so you simply can't start "from zero."  I've designed, modularized, and commented it well enough to be used by anyone who has a serious interest in a CMake build system.  In fact if I spruce it up a bit, and maybe after CMake 2.4.4 ships so I can remove a workaround or two, it might even serve as good tutorial code for CMake newbies.  I might promote both CMake and Chicken that way.

I could walk away from Chicken right now, or get hit by a truck, and CMake will prosper if at least 1 person wants to make it prosper.  It's the cultural questions that plague me, not the technical ones.  The technical ones are solved.  My tools for getting people to desire CMake are very limited.  I doubt it'll spread like wildfire because it's just a build, and people are awfully "inert" (I want to say lazy, but it's more fair / responsible to say "inert") about what they like to do on a command line.  Even on the CMake-Promote mailing list we don't have any magical answers for this problem of adoption.

never mind all of Chicken.  Felix, if you bail out, Chicken
probably dies, and that matters to people who are using it.
  

Yes, that matters.  My strategic thought has been, it's BSD licensed code, and I do have an interest in writing compilers.  So maybe 2 years from now, I'll know the implementation well enough that in the worst case, it won't matter to me what Felix is doing.  Right now I'd be toast though.  Chicken *is* fully understandable by 1 person.  Felix is right to pitch "Chicken is a small implementation" as one of its advantages, especially compared to Common Lisp.  I just don't currently have a spare 1 year to reach that understanding.  I don't even have a spare 4 weeks; I gotta stop playing computer guy and start playing ditch digger.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every