On 2016-09-23 12:30-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote: > Note, a decade-old build system normally accumulates a lot of cruft > and PLplot is no exception in that regard. So reducing that cruft and > also learning to take advantage of modern CMake facilities requires a > substantial amount of on-going maintenance. But I am happy to do that > maintenance because the result is a build system that is much more > sophisticated and useful than what we created a decade ago which in > turn was already a bit more sophisticated than what we could achieve > with autotools at that time.
I want to correct a slightly wrong impression I gave there. I am positive that with enough care and learning experience anything we do with CMake could also be replicated by autotools and vice versa so fundamentally there is no limit on the sophistication of build systems implemented with _either_ CMake or autotools. However, that said, it is also fair to say that once someone uses CMake seriously for a short time (it was just a few hours for me and other PLplot developers who wanted to change the PLplot build system in some way have had similar quick-learning experiences), they will find most build-system and test-system components so easy to implement with CMake that they by far prefer to use CMake rather than autotools for that task from then on. Which is why we dropped our autotools-based build system so quickly a decade ago. In sum, we were pretty heavy autotools users, but we tried CMake and never looked back. And I expect most autotools users that try CMake will also have similar positive experiences with it. 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); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
