[CMake] CMake Marketing

[William A. Hoffman]

At 09:09 PM 12/20/2005, E. Wing wrote:


>Also being able to pregenerate a stand-alone project that could be
>copied to other systems would be a handy feature for OS X. On OS X,
>paths are generally extremely predictable so this is actually possible
>unlike Windows. Having an intermediate step of always having to run
>CMake can be uninviting to new users who download some source code
>they got on the internet for the first time. (Having to install CMake
>is another issue, but there probably isn't much that could be done
>about this.) 

Mac paths are no more or less predicable than any other OS.  The problem is
that if you use any of the FIND_* stuff or TRY_COMPILE stuff in CMake, the
resulting makefiles/project files can not be safely moved to another computer.
autoconf gets away with this, because it uses /bin/sh, grep, and a bunch
of other unix tools at system inspection time, and generates the makefiles right
then.  So, for autotools, as long as you are on a UNIX like system, there is
nothing extra to install.

There are two solutions for this problem:

1. Create a minimal cmake distribution that can be distributed in source code
with a project.  It would use the cmake bootstrap script to first build cmake for
the project, then it would run the cmake it just built on the project.  This would
only make sense for larger projects.  You would not want the build of cmake to take
longer than the build of the project.  This is how Qt uses qmake.  

2. CMake becomes so popular that it is installed on almost all machines by default.


Although, if you are comparing CMake with Scons, scons requires both python and
scons to be installed before using it.

-Bill