+1 having a build tool that supports multiple platforms is worth the dependency. I've also had good experiences with cmake.
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Colin McCabe <cmcc...@alumni.cmu.edu> wrote: > Hi all, > > We'd like to use CMake instead of autotools to build native (C/C++) code in > Hadoop. There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. For one thing, it is > not feasible to use autotools on the Windows platform, because it depends on > UNIX shell scripts, the m4 macro processor, and some other pieces of > infrastructure which are not present on Windows. > > For another thing, CMake builds are substantially simpler and faster, because > there is only one layer of generated code. With autotools, you have automake > generating m4 code which autoconf reads, which it uses to generate a UNIX > shell > script, which then generates another UNIX shell script, which eventually > generates Makefiles. CMake simply generates Makefiles out of CMakeLists.txt > files-- much simpler to understand and debug, and much faster. > CMake is a lot easier to learn. > > automake error messages can be very, very confusing. This is because you are > essentially debugging a pile of shell scripts and macros, rather than a > coherent whole. So you see error messages like "autoreconf: cannot empty > /tmp/ar0.4849: Is a directory" or "Can't locate object method "path" via > package "Autom4te... and so forth. CMake error messages come from the CMake > application and they almost always immediately point you to the problem. > > From a build point of view, the net result of adopting CMake would be that you > would no longer need automake and related programs installed to build the > native parts of Hadoop. Instead, you would need CMake installed. CMake is > packaged by Red Hat, even in RHEL5, so it shouldn't be difficult to install > locally. It's also available for Mac OS X and Windows, as I mentioned > earlier. > > The JIRA for this work is at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8368 > Thanks for reading. > > sincerely, > Colin
