CMake for D2 ready for testers [ drifting off topic ]

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2010-10-09 at 13:01 +0200, klickverbot wrote:

> 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…

Personal communication with the parties involved and being in on various
email exchanges about the whole thing, some of which can be found on the
SCons and KDE mailing list archives.

> 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.

The article paints something of a rosy picture on the incident, and I
find it a bit disingenuous to try and shift blame to the SCons
developers when actually it was more complicated than that.

If we want to go into details we can but I think not on this email list.

> 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.

In some ways this is a very true statement, but this shouldn't taken as
"SCons is rubbish".  There are crucial differences in the way Waf and
SCons work which mean both are right in their own way.  Having said this
there are a couple of classes in the SCons implementation that need to
be totally rewritten.

> 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.

Clearly CMake works fine now for KDE.  This is good.  However I take
issue with the sentiment of the last phrase.  You imply that CMake works
and SCons doesn't (overstating things a bit I guess, but . . . ), I
think that it is not reasonable to make this inference.  If the bksys
route had been followed up as the CMake one was at the time I am certain
that it would be working as well today for KDE.  But that is speculation
since there can be no actual data now.

Again, we can go over this if you want, but I suggest not on this email
list.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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