On Dec 17, 2007 10:35 PM, Alan W. Irwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > BUT autotools were first to market in the Linux world so there are still a > large number of Linux projects that continue with autotools. However, my > guess based on obvious technical superiority, the possibility of porting to > windows (not all Linux projects are like Chicken!), and the huge > advertisement the KDE adoption gave to CMake is that the current CMake share > of Linux projects is strongly growing at the expense of autotools.
Plus, if I had a better pattern matching technology and another 6 months of either willpower or funding, I could implement completely automagical conversion from GNU Autoconf + GMake to CMake. Including the nasty awk + grep + egrep + sed tools that Unixen like to use. Haven't decided if I really want to take it on though. I need the better pattern matching technology. > Brandon, because of this strong growth, I disagree with your emphasis on the > importance of strategic decisions now for CMake. Those were done a long > time ago, and people and projects are strongly voting with their feet > despite (and this is an extremely important consideration) virtually > everybody absolutely hating to change build systems. So long as the CMake > developers steer a steady course and don't shoot themselves in the foot with > some stupid decision, their strong growth will continue, and as a result I > think they we be _the_ major build system in the decades to come. I'm not that bullish. I live in a Windows + console game development universe where plenty of people try out CMake and tell me it sucks. Not necessarily for well-measured reasons, but initial impressions do count. A lot of these people end up rolling their own because custom-built NIH is endemic to the game industry. I think it has to do with game projects not lasting long enough to be reused. There's a huge burnout rate for game developers, with entire programming and art teams getting swapped mid-project. So nobody knows what's going on, nobody likes what was done before, and projects tend to be rewritten from scratch. I also don't see how you could read all those articles I just posted, and assume that CMake is going to sweep the table in decades to come. A far more likely scenario is some Java or C# technology spills over into the C/C++ universe and becomes a checkbox item. > Thus, my own feeling is CMake developers and users can quit worrying about > market share since the future is bright indeed on that score almost > regardless of what they do. Instead, they should totally concentrate on > technical improvements that don't disturb things too much and which make > CMake build systems simply easier to design and maintain. I guess you have no fear of a Disruptive Technology biting you in the ass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology I prefer to keep my eye on the 8-ball. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ CMake mailing list [email protected] http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
