On Tuesday, February 01, 2011 19:14:34 Andreas Pakulat wrote: > Once you know it puts that into the PATHS option the rest is a mere look > at the cmake manual
As soon as you mentioned having to dive into the CMake manual to make something work you have lost a fair amount of bleeding edge testers for KDE, or your app, or whatever it is you're trying to get built. Tools like build-tool and kdesrc-build aren't just for developers who already know how to dive through CMake failure logs (kdesrc-build is so dated that unsermake was the new hotness when I started writing it, back when it was called kdecvs-build). When did making it easy to build KDE become controversial again? Do we also expect to go back to the days in C when we had to manually construct and destroy objects and use macros for collections? I don't think Michael was ever claiming that you can't or shouldn't use CMake directly. After all his recipes use CMake themselves. What he *is* saying is that performing a build of a full desktop is certainly harder than "simply" running a source update, cmake, and make. (And in case it's not clear, I completely agree) e.g. worrying about environment variables like PKG_CONFIG_PATH is no idle claim (kdesrc-build sets that as well), along with PATH in order to pick up the right Qt version. As another example, what happens when the random user ends up with a magically-locked svn repo? Is he going to know that he has to run 'svn cleanup'? He probably won't, but kdesrc-build will. Likewise, (for svn modules at least) kdesrc-build will tell the user directly if there somehow ended up being a source conflict instead of the user finding out something is up from a bunch of build errors. Worse yet, what happens when you make that manual CMake run but you forgot to set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. If you do that on a module like kdepim you might waste an hour building before the install fails due to lack of root permissions, whereas with build-tool or kdesrc-build the desired install path is set in one spot, and the script won't forget to set it. Much of the history of computing is devoted to automating repetitive tasks. Why is this one task so different that it doesn't warrant automating? :) Regards, - Michael Pyne
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