[CMake] Re: CMake Marketing

[William A. Hoffman]

At 11:26 PM 12/20/2005, E. Wing wrote:

>Sorry, I should have been a little more specific: In my little subset
>of the world where I use standard Apple supplied components and all
>3rd party stuff is in Frameworks, and I don't need to run checks
>because I know I'm on an OS X system and I know how things are
>configured, then this feature is really handy. Even though this is a
>subset of things, in practice, it actually comes up quite often for
>me. This is how we are able to prepare Xcode projects for projects
>like SDL and OpenSceneGraph. We know what's already preinstalled, and
>3rd party frameworks are always installed to /Library/Frameworks or
>$(HOME)/Library/Frameworks. We just add those two paths to the search
>path (Xcode lets you use the variable $(HOME)), and everything
>generally works everywhere. If the framework isn't installed, then the
>build process fails, but it usually is pretty obvious what happened at
>that point so the user knows they need to install the missing
>framework.

As you say this is a small subset, and CMake is a general purpose tool.
If we say this is supported, then people will complain when it does not work.
If you turn on CMAKE_USE_RELATIVE_PATHS, and CMAKE_SUPRESS_REGENERATION, you might
get something that would work, but there are MANY cases that would fail, so
buyer beware.  For example, with the Mac changing to intel, I could see projects
not being that portable from an intel Mac to old Mac. 

>I think SCons provides an embedded Python with their distribution now
>if you need it.

Regardless, if you are comparing Scons to CMake, they both require users of the
package to install a new build tool.  

-Bill