[CMake] community swelling due to standard languages

[Brandon Van Every]

Reading http://blog.aslakhellesoy.com/tags/jruby/ I get the impression
that the Ruby + Java universe has a *lot* of developers banging on
things.  The things banged out may not all be good, but there's a
variety of offerings, and a continuous outpouring of energy and
cross-pollenation.  The CMake community does pretty well in its own
right.  One of the things that attracted me to CMake early on, was
Kitware's responsiveness to the community, and its ability to turn
community input into actual product.  But I do wonder what would
happen if an order of magnitude more developers was inserted into the
CMake improvement process.

Maybe it wouldn't all be good!  :-)  Maybe too many cooks spoil the
broth and one ends up with community schisms on build tool approaches.
 Maybe one gets a bit of paralysis as I've seen in some large open
source communities, where there's a perceived need to "fairly
consider" the input of too many people.  Maybe there are "herd
mentalities" in large communities that make it difficult to turn some
things around.  For instance, everyone seemed to think XML was a good
idea for Java build systems once upon a time.  So Ant got very popular
and is terribly pervasive.  Now there's a movement that thinks XML
wasn't such a hot idea, that you really do need scripting in a build
system after all, and that it's advantageous to get rid of the XML.
This notion seems to have gained steam for about the past 4 years.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every