CMake for D2 ready for testers

[klickverbot]

On 10/9/10 11:40 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> Well KDE was about to choose bksys (the immediate ancestor of Waf) until
> some nasty politiking went on and all of a sudden they chose CMake.  I
> don't know all the details, but I know enough to say that that decision
> was not made based on a proper study.

If you accuse someone of not basing the decision »on a proper study«, I 
am sure you have some references on hand for that? Usually, a lot of 
decisions regarding KDE is made based on a meritocracy-like system, 
»nasty politiking« isn't something I'd expect to see very often…

This article[1] from the KDE build system maintainer paints quite a 
different picture. It seems that they indeed tried to use SCons, even 
actively worked at the SCons extension bksys (as in »Build Kde System«). 
Apparently, however, a number of not quite easily resolvable problems 
popped up (including missing support by the SCons upstream), so they 
ditched SCons/bksys and went with CMake.

Later on, somebody decided to do a complete rewrite of bksys/SCons, 
because some of the problems were apparently related so closely to the 
internals of SCons that there was no other feasible way of fixing them.

I agree that the macro language of CMake is probably not the most 
beautiful solution (a port to Lua is planned, IIRC), but it has been 
proven to work almost flawlessly on huge projects. Even for the build 
system cracks of the KDE project, autotools was a constant source of 
trouble back when they used it – CMake apparently has solved most of the 
problems, while SCons/bksys failed at it.


[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/