Re: Fwd: [CMake] Adding cross-compiler support to CMake ... (fwd)

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Arjen Markus wrote: Michael Casadevall wrote: My intent here is not to start a flamewar between autotools and cmake, In some cases, autotools is the proper tool vs cmake due to cross-compiling (which will hopefully fixed) and the fact that you need the cmake executable to build any CMake package. autotools configure script merely needs a shell interpreter, What do you mean "merely" needs a shell interpreter? For a fair chunk of embedded devices out there, that's tantamount to saying that the Titanic "merely" needs to pull into port. There are 3 cases for embedded devices: - systems with a Bourne shell and ccmake available - systems with a Bourne shell available - systems without any kind of shell, or really any kind of resources Yes, Autoconf has more cross-compilation reach than CMake at present, but it hardly covers everything. Don't forget all those PCs with Windows installed but no Cygwin or MingW: they simply can not use the configure scripts. Of course, one can require these users to install Cygwin or MingW, but what is that different from installing CMake? The level of pain.  Cygwin is easy.  It just takes a lot more MB of downloads to have a working system, than to grab CMake.  Or, uh, you can grab the CMake that's in Cygwin.  :-) MinGW / MSYS has become *awful* if you're trying to get Autoconf going.  I spent an entire day on it recently and almost gave up.  The only thing that saved my ass was a rogue 3rd party project called mingw-install.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install  It *nukes* the whole MSYS mess and puts in a bunch of stuff that actually works, with the most current versions of Autoconf and whatnot.  There's a whole pile of integration issues that MSYS hasn't dealt with, they're too lazy.  They're laboring under the delusion that their MinGWPort stuff actually works, when in fact it's quite broken.  I don't have time to rag on them on their mailing list about it.  I just use mingw-install and sing its praises.  Better comment out those "rm -r" lines though!  Everything worked fine once I dropped my own compiler in afterwards. Cheers, Brandon Van Every

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