[cmake-developers] Rename Ninja generator?

[Peter Kümmel]

On 09.03.2012 03:34, Peter Collingbourne wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 05:44:09PM -0500, Bill Hoffman wrote:
>> Thoughts?
>
> Hi Bill,
>
> I thought about this for a while and I decided that this probably
> isn't a good idea for a few reasons:
>
> 1) It is inaccurate.  The Ninja generator uses a fundamentally different
>     approach to generating build files and I think that should be
>     reflected in the name.
>
> 2) If we go with your suggestion, things will continue to work if what
>     the project does for Make happens to also be appropriate for Ninja.
>     But that isn't always the case -- if the project cares about
>     which generator is being used then it may well be doing something
>     specific to the Makefile generator (such as relying on the fact
>     that CMake builds recursive makefiles by running the build program
>     in a subdirectory, or using "$(MAKE)" -- you can see an example
>     of that in ExternalProject.cmake).  In that case things would break
>     unless the conditional excludes Ninja:
>
>     IF(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Makefiles" AND NOT CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Ninja")
>
>     Things like that need to be decided on a case by case basis by
>     the project developer and I don't see any reason to favour one
>     scenario over the other.  All things being equal I would err on
>     the conservative side and say that Ninja shouldn't receive any
>     special treatment from projects by default -- if projects need
>     the Ninja generator to get the same special treatment, they can
>     match Ninja explicitly.
>
> 3) Less typing :) (Though one idea I had for improving the
>     user interface for the -G option was to allow the argument to
>     be matched case insensitively, and for unambiguous prefixes to
>     be expanded.  So for example you could say -G nmake which would
>     be disambiguated to "NMake Makefiles", but -G n would return an
>     error since it matches both Ninja and NMake).

Yes, please don't call it a Makefile when it is definitely NOT a Makefile.

I also like the short -GNinja. -G"Visual Studio 9 2008" is really to long
as command line argument.

Peter