[LLVMdev] Is there room for another build system?

[Stuart Hastings]

> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:54:35 +0200
> From: Albert Graef <Dr.Graef at t-online.de>
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Is there room for another build system?
> To: LLVM Developers Mailing List <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Message-ID: <4890C6FB.7090106 at t-online.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Duncan Sands wrote:
>> Do ordinary users need to have cmake if they want to build llvm?
>> If so, that's bad because they'll have to install it (unlike the
>> current setup, where only very standard tools are needed).
>
> That's not the only problem with cmake. The autotools may be a big and
> ugly beast, but that's because they're trying to solve a big and ugly
> problem for which there is no silver bullet. And they are still much
> more comprehensive than cmake. I've considered cmake time and again  
> for
> my own projects, but I don't think that it's quite there yet. Here are
> some points worth considering: http://www.remlab.net/op/cmake.shtml
> (Some of these may already be addressed in newer cmake versions, I
> haven't checked recently.)
>
> Albert

I'm not qualified to argue the pros and cons of build systems, but the  
topic is interesting to me, and I'm grateful to you for the link.

Here's a little more fuel for the discussion:

	http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1715/

Also, this page purports to explain why KDE abandoned SCons for  
CMAKE.  Alas, it lacks detail about the problems they found, other  
than "major problems building KDE on non-Linux platforms with SCons  
(e.g. on OS X)..."

	http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/

stuart