On 2007-09-02 22:29-0400 Salazar, German P21322 wrote: > ...so I went ahead and learned GNU MAKE for good. Now I > have some fancy make files that do all sorts of things and I control > every bit of it...by the way, are you in total control with CMAKE, too? > What kind of files does it generate? Is it like using Frontpage to > generate (dirty) html code? (these are rhetorical questions, by the way; > you don't really need to answer).
Well, those are good questions so I will try to answer. CMake has a number of "generator" backends depending on platform, but the principal one for Unix is the Makefile generator which creates Makefiles in the native make command vernacular (e.g., GNU make on Linux). So typically for Linux/Unix you configure, build, and install with the three commands "cmake", "make", and "make install". A good analogy is "cmake" is to "make" as a compiler is to an assembler. Some developers may feel they have more control by looking at the generated assembler language and perhaps modifying it, but few actually do that and instead work exclusively with the higher-level language instead. Fortunately, CMake has an easy-to-understand syntax and is quite powerful so there is never any reason to modify the Makefiles that cmake generates. To illustrate CMake's power, note that KDE4 (now in beta) is configured exclusively with it. Finally, PLplot developers have liked our new CMake-based build system so much that they have completely quit working on the autotools-based build system we had before on the Unix side and the home-brew configuration system we had on the windows side. Note that legacy autotools-based build system which was accidentally screwed up by a one-line error for 5.7.4 should still be available with that error fixed for our forthcoming 5.8.0 release. However, all users of the legacy autotools build system for 5.8.0 will be missing all the PLplot features (new drivers and bindings) developed in this last year. Furthermore, we plan to remove that autotools-based build system completely soon after the release of 5.8.0 since it is falling so far behind. We will make the official announcement of this change in the 5.8.0 release notes. > > Talking about multiplatform: > > Linux installation went without a glitch. > Solaris gave a little problem. > And in Windows, we just couldn't get pltcl to install at all. Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are the most heavily used platforms for our CMake-based build system. Solaris is a much less tricky brand of Unix than Mac OS X so it should "just work", but we don't have nearly the experience with that platform compared to the other three. Anyhow, if you have followed the directions at http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/, and you still get errors, then send in the details of the errors here for some help. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
