* On 2015 04 Jul 10:00 -0500, Roger Leigh wrote: > Mostly agreed on all the points you made. But WRT the autotools, they are > such a baroque collection of tools, requiring knowledge of a minimum of five > languages to use effectively (Bourne shell, m4, make, autoconf and > automake), I can't really recommend learning them over learning CMake. > CMake is not the cleanest scripting language either, but you only need to > learn one rather than five; on top of that, it's portable to more systems, > more powerful and vastly simpler to learn. Unless you're heavily invested > in existing autotools-using projects, I don't think it's worth the pain, to > be honest. [I say this as an autotools user of 15 years, who switched his > projects to CMake over the last two years.]
Thanks for your perspective, Roger, and everyone else. I'd like to add that I do not mean to scare John off, and, sadly, one's first encounter with Autotools can do just that. For the most part, contributing to a project will involve little need to work with Autotools until one adds a new source file to the tree. Then a bit of editing of the relevant Makefile.am and/or configure.ac may be required. The project maintainers will likely have some documentation to that effect to help the new contributor along. I cannot disagree that if John were starting a project from scratch that using Cmake is likely a more sane approach. The intent of my post was to give John an idea of what he is likely to encounter in various projects. - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
