Hi all:  After just building a set of custom RPMs for the new plplot and 
all its dependencies (including cmake), I would just as soon not see 
plplot's build system changed again soon.

I also struggle with understanding cmake (I have not spent much time on 
it, but it seems confusing) but a change in something as basic as the 
build system imposes a fair amount of work on users.  I find autoconf 
confusing as well, for what its worth. I would bet a python or perl-based 
system would also end up being tricky and full of odd platform-dependent 
quirks.

So, here's one vote for stability!

Thanks,

   Doug

dh...@ucar.edu
Software Engineer
UCAR - COSMIC, Tel. (303) 497-2611

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009, Hazen Babcock wrote:

> Werner Smekal wrote:
>> Hi Geoffrey,
>>> But what about Python?  If I was trying to build a system from
>>> scratch with
>>> the same goals as cmake (as far as I understand that from the
>>> reading that I
>>> have done about it), there is no way on earth I would've started off
>>> by
>>> defining a new language.  Especially not a quirky, byzantine
>>> language.  Isn't
>>> Python on every platform that cmake is on?  Wouldn't it make a lot
>>> more sense
>>> to have used a "real language", with great data structures, and
>>> libraries,
>>> and a module system, and all that?
>>
>> Introducing scons: http://www.scons.org/ - more or less the same aims
>> then cmake, but all in Python. But at the time when we changed the
>> build system, it just wasn't up to the task. I tried it for one of my
>> bigger projects and failed, since it didn't get the basic things right
>> - e.g. project files for Visual C++. And in my opinion the whole
>> structure to configure things was not well "developed". Although the
>> project was quite "big", it didn't depend on many 3rd party libraries,
>> but the configure files where quite big. And I had to configure things
>> for every operating system I used - this is much better done by cmake.
>
> I'm also a Python fan, and I also struggle with CMake, but my impression
> is that the last line of the comparison with CMake section at the link
> below captures the current situation pretty well:
>
> "To sum up, my very subjective opinion is that scons is a better idea,
> but CMake has a stronger implementation "
>
> http://www.scons.org/wiki/SconsVsOtherBuildTools#head-3d0faf3f1d4d3b73f31eaa0ba97d4df18a474369
>
> -Hazen
>
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