Re: wm/ctwm without cmake

[Benny Siegert <bsiegert%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 3:47 AM Greg A. Woods <woods%planix.ca@localhost> wrote:
> I've sworn to never ever use CMake, nor to allow it to exist on my
> machines, nor even to be used in my presence.

I think I see where you are coming from, but let me warn you that this
kind of stance will not work in the long run. I vividly remember a
fellow developer of an open source project being extremely opposed
about SATA hard drives in PCs (as opposed to PATA). Gradually, it
became harder for him to replace broken hardware, as all new drives
became SATA-only.

You can see the same thing happening here, in a way. You want to use
ctwm but you don't like its build system, so you write your own. If
you continue like this, half of pkgsrc will become unusable for you
because of its cmake dependency, unless you rewrite everyone's build
systems.

And now for some cmake apologism: Yes, the cmake package itself is a
bloated C++ codebase. However, in the realm of today's builds, it
barely registers, compared to LLVM, Rust and Firefox.

And cmake does have some very tangible benefits when building
packages: First, configure scripts really are the majority of the
build times on modern hardware (including such lower-end machines as
the Pinebook Pro). cmake configures quite a bit faster. The resulting
builds also run faster: unlike most automake-based builds, the cmake
Makefiles manage to saturate the 8 threads of my amd64 machine
consistently.

The cmake command language is a bit weird but not more so than
configure.ac and Makefile.am.

All in all, for myself, I have decided that the benefits outweigh the
one-time cost of building and installing cmake.

-- 
Benny