* On 2015 04 Jul 10:00 -0500, Roger Leigh wrote:

> Mostly agreed on all the points you made. But WRT the autotools, they are
> such a baroque collection of tools, requiring knowledge of a minimum of five
> languages to use effectively (Bourne shell, m4, make, autoconf and
> automake), I can't really recommend learning them over learning CMake.
> CMake is not the cleanest scripting language either, but you only need to
> learn one rather than five; on top of that, it's portable to more systems,
> more powerful and vastly simpler to learn. Unless you're heavily invested
> in existing autotools-using projects, I don't think it's worth the pain, to
> be honest. [I say this as an autotools user of 15 years, who switched his
> projects to CMake over the last two years.]

Thanks for your perspective, Roger, and everyone else.

I'd like to add that I do not mean to scare John off, and, sadly, one's
first encounter with Autotools can do just that. For the most part,
contributing to a project will involve little need to work with
Autotools until one adds a new source file to the tree. Then a bit of
editing of the relevant Makefile.am and/or configure.ac may be
required. The project maintainers will likely have some documentation
to that effect to help the new contributor along.

I cannot disagree that if John were starting a project from scratch that
using Cmake is likely a more sane approach. The intent of my post was
to give John an idea of what he is likely to encounter in various
projects.

- Nate

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