On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 05:44:09PM -0500, Bill Hoffman wrote: > I am wondering if we want to call the Ninja generator something like: > > Ninja Makefiles... It is not totally accurate, but it avoids code like > this: > > > IF(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Makefiles" OR CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Ninja") > > Also, it is more likely to work with existing cmake build files. I had > to do the same thing with jom. Although with jom, it pretty much is a > makefile. > > > Thoughts?
Hi Bill, I thought about this for a while and I decided that this probably isn't a good idea for a few reasons: 1) It is inaccurate. The Ninja generator uses a fundamentally different approach to generating build files and I think that should be reflected in the name. 2) If we go with your suggestion, things will continue to work if what the project does for Make happens to also be appropriate for Ninja. But that isn't always the case -- if the project cares about which generator is being used then it may well be doing something specific to the Makefile generator (such as relying on the fact that CMake builds recursive makefiles by running the build program in a subdirectory, or using "$(MAKE)" -- you can see an example of that in ExternalProject.cmake). In that case things would break unless the conditional excludes Ninja: IF(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Makefiles" AND NOT CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Ninja") Things like that need to be decided on a case by case basis by the project developer and I don't see any reason to favour one scenario over the other. All things being equal I would err on the conservative side and say that Ninja shouldn't receive any special treatment from projects by default -- if projects need the Ninja generator to get the same special treatment, they can match Ninja explicitly. 3) Less typing :) (Though one idea I had for improving the user interface for the -G option was to allow the argument to be matched case insensitively, and for unambiguous prefixes to be expanded. So for example you could say -G nmake which would be disambiguated to "NMake Makefiles", but -G n would return an error since it matches both Ninja and NMake). Thanks, -- Peter -- Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cmake-developers
