Joe Shaw wrote: > Here's a quick rundown of the things people decided to work on:
> * Dan Winship - As a broader goal desktop goal, decided to look > into moving Beagle to Cmake and learn its strengths and > weaknesses. So, mostly I did this because I was just hanging out in that room, and didn't actually have any beagle hacking I was planning to do, and I didn't want Joe to mock me like he did Robert: > * Robert Love - Hanger on; spell checker; incorrectly > attributing typos to me. But also because Joe and Alex Larsson and I had somehow ended up talking about CMake earlier, although I don't remember why. (Background: http://cmake.org, http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/ ("Why the KDE project switched to CMake")) > It sounds like there are a lot of weaknesses, at > least within using it in GNOME. Well, I didn't actually get to look that deeply into it. It has a definitely Windows-ish feel to it which I found kind of icky, but then, I find autotools kind of icky too, so that's not that much of a change. Also, I'd been hoping that KDE's automake-to-cmake conversion script would be useful, but it turned out not to be (I guess it only works if your Makefile.am's use certain KDE-ish conventions?). Many of the existing CMake macros wouldn't work for us as-is; eg, there's a pkg-config macro, but it doesn't let you check the package version, so we'd have to write a new one. Also, the fact that you need to have cmake installed in order to build the package was a point against it relative to autotools. (cmake generates Makefiles [on UNIX], but you can't just run cmake and then ship the Makefiles, because the cmake invocation is the equivalent of running configure in an autotools-based setup.) So anyway, it turns out that I couldn't migrate a large multi-language project from autotools to cmake in a 2-hour hacking session (go figure), and cmake isn't 100% perfect, but maybe it still could turn out to be a good solution for GNOME. Mostly I'm just posting this so that people don't rule it out because they think I actually did a detailed study. (And so that OSNews doesn't post a story entitled "New KDE Build System Not Good Enough For Us, Say Arrogant GNOME Pricks".) -- Dan _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
