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by plorkyeran 4514 days ago
s/Some/All/

I hate using autotools, but every time I touch a project that uses something else (and that is too complex for a ten-line Makefile), I inevitably end up wishing that it used autotools. I suppose it shows that sometimes a few decades of polishing a turd does sort of work.
1 comments
krasin 4514 days ago
what's about cmake?
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cleversoap 4514 days ago
CMake is interesting because the CMakefiles are just a different type of editable/configurable build script (ie. slightly different Makefiles). It's still an interpreted step between build instructions and the output that you actually use to build which isn't meant to be edited and therefore obfuscates part of the process... so autoconf. This is both a strength and weakness in that there are so many external modules for CMake (eg. the various FindX) that they work great most of the time but when they break they are more difficult to fix than an atomic change to the actual compiler flags in a Makefile.

I don't think there will ever be a standard build tool, simply shunts to get the needed functionality from others. Eventually all build tools will exist in each other and the only interface will be recursion.

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CCs 4513 days ago
So far CMake served us well. I'm using it for 8 or so years now for small and larger systems.

I especially like that one file allows me to develop on XCode, somebody else on Visual Studio and finally deploy on Linux/gcc. One config file creates native projects on all 3 platforms, no manual hacking.

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plorkyeran 4513 days ago
CMake has the nice property of being able to generate non-Make build systems, but otherwise is more of just "autotools done differently" rather than "autotools done better". In practice I haven't found it to be any more pleasant to use than autotools.
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lmm 4513 days ago
Have you tried using cmake on e.g. IRIX?
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br0ke 4513 days ago
Yes! A former coworker dug up my old O2 running a 6.5 variant, installed cmake and built BRL-CAD ( http://brlcad.org/ ) with it. Supposedly, it worked quite well (but took a very long time, I believe it was a low end cpu, I want to say 183mhz). Given that I rewrote the build system in 2003 for BRL-CAD to use automake instead of cake, I'm very impressed by cmake.
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