Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 10:22 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 22:28 -0500, Jens Petersen wrote:
>>>
>>>> I would add:
>>>>
>>>> * do not start new projects using autotools as far as possible
>>> I would recommend you to stop spreading FUD.
>> What FUD? 
>>
>> There's an alternative which is:
>> * easier to learn,
>> * more portable,
>> * more backwards-compatible (with its own previous versions),
>> * faster,
>> * generating nicer makefiles (progress percentages, color output),
>> * designed in a better way (information is kept in central places instead of
>> being copied into hundreds of projects),
>> * used by more and more software, including big projects like KDE 4.
>>
>> It's called CMake.
> See, all FUD, you simply are spraying hatred against something you don't
> understand or don't want to understand.
> 
> To me, cmake is
> * not easier to learn, just different
> * non-portable/inflexible.
> * overladden with non-helpful gimmicks like progress percentages and
> color output
> * a crack ridden design (using a central database), reinvention of
> imake, comprising it's design flaws.

I'm not going to contribute to the flamewar by commenting on any of the 
above (not in this thread anyway ;-) ), but...

> * a kde proprietary tool.

...this last point (yes, even taking into account your "not useful 
outside of KDE" revision) is just plain wrong and reads like complete 
and utter ignorance of what CMake is. Yes, KDE4 uses it, but saying it 
is "kde proprietary" is just ludicrous.

Personally, I use CMake these days for pretty much every one-off project 
I do (and I'd promote it as the build tool of choice for any new 
project). Why? Because it's dead simple to write a trivial 
CMakeLists.txt that Just Works for basic stuff. For crying out loud, 
"hello, world" is one line! And the dependency graphs don't rely on 
gcc/m4/whatever. I use it for Qt-only apps. I use it for small C/C++ 
projects and I'm working on a port of a large project incorporating C, 
C++ and Java (that needs to build on Windows also, plus a few even more 
esoteric and not-very-UNIX-like platforms).

CMake was not developed by KDE, nor for KDE. KDE is (one of) the most 
visibly FLOSS users of CMake, and *that's all*. It's /very/ useful as a 
general build tool.

Oh, and, autotools is of marginal usefulness outside of GNU. (Maybe 
that's not true /now/, but I'm quite confident it was when autotools was 
young.)

Ok, so I'll throw in my $0.02 anyway...

Autotools needs a POSIX shell... and for development, better have GNU 
gcc, make, sed, awk, m4, bison, probably others... for ANY project of 
non-trivial complexity (maybe even for trivial complexity, since I've 
never tried to develop an auto* project on a non-Linux platform).

Development with CMake needs... CMake. Plus any dependencies specific to 
the project (which is the project's fault, not CMake's, and not a 
problem autotools would solve). CMake also has the huge advantage that, 
if you can /build/ a project, you can also hack on it without additional 
dependencies, which is absolutely not the case with autotools. 
Similarly, there is no extra step you have to add to go from merely 
building to active hacking.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"Adriaan has bin AWOL"
"s/bin/been/g... I spend way too much time with computers."
   -- Stefan Teleman (on IRC)