Bill Fenner <fen...@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 3:26 PM, Eric S. Raymond <e...@thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> > Or possibly it might have but your build system messed me over. I don't
> > trust
> > autoconf as far as I can throw it.
> >
>
> I understand someone's done a conversion to cmake. Does that make you
> happier or vomityer?
Very slightly happier - at least cmake's implementation isn't nasty crocks
and kludges all the way down like autoconf's is.
Alas, cmake shares one of autoconf's fundamental design flaws:
It's two-phase system that works by generating Makefiles. This makes
good diagnostics basically impossible - any point of failure in the make
execution is too decoupled from the originating recipe.
Two-phase systems have other flaws too. They make it much harder,
maybe impossible, to parallelize a build in a way that's provably
correct with respect to dependencies. (I think this could be done in
theory but all two-phase systems I know of seem incapable of getting
it right in practice.)
I greatly prefer one-phase systems like scons or waf that directly
interpret the recipe. They easily avoid both of the practical
problems I just mentioned - in particular, if you know what you're
doing you can get provably correct parallelism from a toposort
of the dependency graph.
I think waf is currently the best of breed - it's what we've been
using on NTPsec and I find its speed and parallelization performance
is unmatched - but I acknowledge one serious problem with it; the
documentation is terrible. Very comprehensive if you can think like
the designer but for anyone else it might as well be written in
Sanskrit mixed with tensor calculus. Makes the learning curve a bit
rough.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.
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