At Thu, 10 Mar 2022 12:02:56 +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: wm/ctwm without cmake
Yeah, except that cmake is actually one of the few mostly sane
alternatives to autoconf.
Wow. I have to believe you haven't really looked at it deeply, nor
fought with it to try to make it work on any real-world projects, or
else I can't understand your claim in any way shape or form, even with
the caveat of "mostly".
It claims to be a "makefile generator", but it can't even build any
stand-alone Makefiles of any dialect.
I really don't like autoconf, and automake isn't any better, and that
self-modifying now-unnecessary mess called libtool is worst of all, but
all of it is at least cogent and built upon wide and deep experience,
using real languages and standard tools, solves real-world problems, and
it continues to work in a vast number of environments with very little
pre-installed tooling beyond a POSIX userland. It's even proven to be
readily "forwards compatible" in the most important ways.
CMake didn't even try to fix any of the _real_ problems with autotools
(it just makes a very small part of the experience less time consuming)
(oh, and I guess if you're a Windows developer, it has a pointyclicky
interface and (maybe?) doesn't need an underlying POSIX environment)
It's not going away
Indeed. There are far too many C++ and Windows programmers enamoured
with it. (Why is it there seems to be a strong correlation between
being a C++ programmer and a Windows(-friendly) programmer?)
That alone though doesn't make it worth supporting in any way.
Most new languages on the block are building self-hosted build systems
in their own language. I guess the non-POSIX-using C++ folks felt left
out and wanted a build system written in C++ and with some of the
complexity and inelegant nature of C++ that they seem to love so much?
and I at least will oppose
any pkgsrc patches that replace it "just because".
I'm sad to hear that, especially from you, but, oh well. :-)
I guess I can't expect the wider NetBSD and pkgsrc community to share
all of my convictions, even the most strongly held ones, no matter how
much I might expect or want them to.
What about replacing CMake with the Go build system? I'm sure it can
trivially and easily be bent into driving any other compiler too. It's
extremely fast, not bloated in the least, easy to understand, and also
widely portable. Only half joking.
(one can probably build Go compilers and runtimes for all supported
systems in a tenth or less the time it takes to build CMake for one
platform, never mind also building the C++ compiler it also needs)
--
Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost>
Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost>
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