[CMake] RE: CMake Marketing

[Karr, David A.]

I'm a little puzzled to read that Delta3D switched from CMake to SCons
because they were doing more in Linux.  I pushed to have CMake adopted
by my primary project (a NASA prototype for future concepts in air
traffic control) two years ago partly because I was able to confirm that
it would support dual maintenance of our C++ code in Windows and Linux.
We've been using CMake for 2+ years on this project now, and while we
haven't done a lot in Linux after all I have occasionally run a build
there and found CMake to work smoothly enough.

In fact I think transitioning from VC++ 6 to VC++ .NET is more
problematic for this particular project than from VC++ to Linux.  The
person who set up the project initially in VC++ 6 sent the LIB, DLL, and
EXE files to places that don't have "Release" or "Debug" in the path,
which was tricky to get the VC++ 6 project generator to do (I had to
edit the templates), and I have not figured out how to get the VC++ 7
project generator to do this except by altering the CMake source code.

I do have to agree I would like more from the documentation.  We don't
have much requirement for training on the project where I use CMake,
since we drive CMake from a script; we have an automated nightly build
that completely rebuilds the project including all the DSP and DSW
files, and one can invoke the script at any time to build or rebuild a
workspace.  We never used the GUI.  Everyone did have to learn how to
edit CMakeLists.txt to add or remove source files, but I've recently
gotten rid of even that requirement.  (I made a utility that
automatically collects the lists of files.)  On the other hand, even I
don't fully understand how to specify library dependencies yet, and for
any real question about how CMake works, I usually either use trial and
error to see what CMake will do or I examine the source code.

David Karr