Re: Multi-platform build system

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>> Experience shows that a cmake spec usually is a fraction of the
>> length of the equivalent autoconf+automake/Makefile spec,
>> line-wise. Maintenance work is proportionally reduced. It's easier
>> to add new features, too.
>
> Off-topic, but I'm quite skeptical of this claim, compared to
> automake.  Makefile.am files tend to be pretty darn close to the
> minimal amount of information required to build (in typical cases: a
> list of source files), and very easy to extend.
>
> Automake's implementation is not very pretty, but the interface
> presented to the user is extremely good.

Well, automake scripts can be easy once you know how to handle them, but
auto* seems hard to learn.

My first experience with a big and complex project was LLVM
(www.llvm.org) What they have now is half as complex as the system I
wrote because they removed features (because of changing trade-off). It
took me a few weekends to write (keep in mind that I was a total
beginner with cmake) being the main time-consuming factor the large
amount of time each test build required. Since, people who had no
previous experience with autoconf/make nor with cmake claim to be more
at easy with the cmake build.

All of this is very subjective, of course. The Emacs build is not your
typical C/C++ project, which cmake is optimized for, but neither it is
LLVM, and it worked very well.