Re: [Chicken-users] understanding the CMake build

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Thomas Chust wrote:
> Not only is the CMake documentation scarce, it also frequently seems 
> to be wrong and in the past four weeks I have not managed, even after 
> modifications in the CMakeLists.txt files, to get two large CMake 
> powered projects, namely CHICKEN and VTK, to build using CMake 2.4.3 
> on either
>
>    - MacOS X using gcc-3.3
>    - MacOS X using gcc-4.0

As I don't have a Mac, and I don't really know the quality of CMake's 
MacOS X support, it wouldn't surprise me if there are troubles here.  
Felix, don't you have a Mac?  Not trying to add to your burdens, but we 
do need someone around here who can test on the Mac at least occasionally.

>    - Windows XP Professional using MinGW gcc-3.2 and MSYS
>    - Windows XP Professional using MinGW gcc-3.2 without MSYS

Chicken isn't building on these 2 platforms??  This shocks me.  Granted 
I use Windows 2000, but I build on MinGW / MSYS all the time.  It's my 
canonical build platform.  Please report any errors on MinGW / MSYS 
forthwith.  If these aren't building out of the box then something is 
gravely wrong.  I hope you're just having troubles with VTK here and not 
Chicken.

>    - Windows XP Professional using Open Watcom 1.5

The support for Watcom in CMake is very recent, and I haven't tested 
with it.  If it is important to you, and you're willing to test 
regularly the way John Cowan is testing on Cygwin, then I'll set up 
Watcom and deal with problems as you report them.  Otherwise, I do very 
much regard Watcom as a fringe compiler.  Not something I'll support 
without at least 1 consumer who definitely needs the support and is 
willing to help with the testing.

Similar offer for any Borland aficionados.

> Everytime at least the linker flags are terribly messed up in some 
> creative ways I could never devise when writing a Makefile by hand ;-) 

Are you speaking of VTK here?  Chicken just doesn't have that many 
linker flags, so I have trouble imagining how they could become 
tremendously perverted.

> I'm especially amazed how CMake manages to screw up Java compiler and 
> archiver flags as the JDK tools are really easy to use and have the 
> same command line options on every platform.

CMake is a C/C++ oriented build tool.  Java support is pretty recent and 
I wouldn't expect much from CMake at all.  I think it's good that CMake 
wants to expand its horizons to other languages, but the reality is Java 
is well served by Ant.  It makes little strategic sense for CMake to try 
to fight Ant on its home turf, at least for now.  Anyways, I must admit 
I personally don't care about Java or C#.  That's why I'm working on 
Chicken.  If Java and C# integration are important to your needs, Bigloo 
Scheme is the better project as it has C, Java, and C# capabilities.  I 
went to Chicken because it has a larger community, some C++ support, a 
BSD license rather than GPL, Windows builds under source control (Bigloo 
*still* doesn't have this), and is almost as fast as Bigloo.

> Plus I only managed to get one of my own software libraries to build 
> using CMake with so many tweaks and tricks in the CMakeLists.txt file 
> that I felt the urge to promptly throw away this new build system when 
> I saw that the one CMake build control file was by far larger than the 
> hand written Makefiles for all the platforms I need to support together!

Hrm.  Yeah, CMake is better than Autoconf but it ain't perfect yet.  I 
think it will get there.  Every minor release brings major improvements; 
more "stupid stuff" goes away.  When I got started on Chicken, I thought 
CMake 2.2 was a disaster.  If CMake had stayed like that, I would have 
called it a failed technology and moved on.  But it didn't!  The Kitware 
guys rapidly fixed all my major objections.  I was able to use CMake 2.3 
in CVS and things were fine.  I've had a few annoying workarounds in 
CMake 2.4.3, concerning Cygwin library names, and also the need for a 
/static subdirectory, but that's it.  From my build perspective there 
aren't too many warts remaining.  The one I really wish they'd cure, is 
to unify the notion of file dependencies with the notion of target 
dependencies.  That is unnecessarily idiosyncratic, but they're dealing 
with the realities of their implementation and they just can't move fast 
on that problem.


> I've not completely given up on CMake, yet, but I'm starting to get 
> slightly annoyed and to wonder which platforms this supposedly cross 
> platform make tool is working on at all...
>
> Not that the GNU autotools would be any easier to use than CMake, but 
> at least every autotools configured build system I have met so far 
> worked out of the box on at least one of the platforms mentioned above...

Well, if Automake is still working for you on Chicken, realize, that's 
in part because I got in there over the past 3 weeks and unified it with 
the CMake build.  I made Automake do the same things CMake does, to the 
degree that Automake's notion of a build could be made the same.  So I'm 
saying, Automake is not any better and CMake is not any worse as far as 
what they're doing for Chicken right now.  Now, if Automake breaks, feel 
free to yell at me.  It could be my fault; that said, Felix has made 
some changes too.  Don't yell at Felix though.  :-)


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every