On Sat, Jul 04, 2015 at 11:17:36AM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> * 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.

There's also scons, which is yet another make tool. THis one is based
on python, and make rules arre writtne in python. You can use it for
any language by affing the appropriate python functions.

-- hendrik