[LLVMdev] Is there room for another build system?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Duncan Sands <baldrick at free.fr> writes:

> Hi,
>
>> CMake just requires one plain text file named CMakeLists.txt on every
>> source directory, and the only maintenance is to keep up to date the
>> list of source files of the directory.
>
> can it be kept up-to-date automagically?  After all, you can query
> subversion to get the list of all files in a directory.

Yes, it can, but CMake would do this at configure time, which means that
you'll need to explicitly invoke CMake. If you alter the CMakeLists.txt
file to reflect your change, next time you invoke your build (gmake,
nmake, Visual Studio...) it automatically notices this and does the
right thing.

Please note that CMake (unlike SCons) is not a replacement for `make',
it is a makefile generator, so the amount of intelligence it can inject
on its output (makefiles, Visual Studio projects, etc) is limited.

> Do ordinary users need to have cmake if they want to build llvm?

Yes.

> 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 something to count on the `against' side, yes.

-- 
Oscar