On Dec 15, 2007 1:55 PM, Brandon Van Every <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Dec 15, 2007 12:41 PM, Bill Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > There are some vocal > > complainers about the language, but I suspect there is a silent majority > > that really don't care, > > CMake is a self-selecting community. Those that really care, leave. > I'd like to know where they went, and what competing products they're > working on.
I've subscribed to the SCons mailing list. The SCons community has people who got fed up with it and started their own R&D. It seems that the SCons Python 1.5 limitation is a serious one, as developers generally only know Python >= 2.2. Waf is the offering of a fellow who clearly thinks OO is important in a build system for some reason. http://code.google.com/p/waf/ A recent comment of his, regarding KDE's use of CMake: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.tools.scons.user/15656/focus=15659 "* Cmake scripts are easily readable from IDEs (kdevelop); in reality parsing-writing Cmake scripts from ides is much more difficult than using object-oriented apis and mapping to xml when needed" Without evaluating the veracity of his claim, or even evaluating Waf at all, this says something important to me. It says that not everybody believes in a "make" paradigm for a build system. I think the generational logic is understandable. In college I did makefiles; after college I learned IMake and Autoconf. That's what people did in the early 1990s. This is now the late 2000s. I've completely ignored the XML universe. Something about all those angle brackets just gives me a rash. But let's say I was just getting out of college right now, and everything was new and squeaky clean to me. Would I be trying to do everything with XML? Would I see OO as fundamental, "of course!" it's easier to do a build system that way? Would I see Make as "fundamentally old fashioned?" Would I have little experience with declarative systems? Little incentive to work with build tools based on "old-fangled" paradigms? Most importantly: would my prejudices cause me to use, or even develop, OO build tools that actually get real work done? Whether coupled to an OO IDE or not. The proof is in the pudding. If there are OO build systems that are having any success, we should pay attention to why. We should be wary of generational biases of what a build system "should" or "shouldn't" look like. Do we really know better than everybody else? Does our extensive engineering experience make us more efficient, productive, and competitive? Or does it (also) make us blind to the technology around the corner? I've seen new generations sweep old generations away. As one young buck put it in that thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.tools.scons.user/15656/focus=15659 "I dunno the particular situation, but for me using CMake sounds like they didn't make the step out of the last decade :-)" Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ CMake mailing list [email protected] http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
