[CMake] improve the CMake language?

[Brandon Van Every]

On Nov 8, 2007 12:10 AM, Gonzalo Garramuño <ggarra at advancedsl.com.ar> wrote:
>
> Anyway... why are you guys so concerned about cmake's license?  To me,
> as long as the code is open source and forkable, that's all I care for
> cmake.  I'm not planning to make money selling a fork of cmake, borrow
> its source code, use cmake as a library nor embed it into another
> program, which are the reasons I might prefer a BSD/MIT license.

1) licenses that are unfriendly to unfettered commercial development,
often don't get accepted by commercial developers.  They don't have
time for the FUD of multiple license holders or "you can do this but
can't do that" clauses.  To the extent that I want CMake to be very
very popular, I don't want the license getting in the way.

2) I don't personally make a habit of investing in software that
encumbers me.  MIT / BSD / zlib-libpng licenses allow me to do
whatever I want with the code.  So long as I have choices, I prefer to
keep my options open.  And I agree with Juan, Lua sounds more
compelling than Ruby.

3) Your license choices are fine for your own use, but you'd need to
talk to Kitware about what they actually want.

> Sure.  That's from your POV.  For me, a language without good and easy
> OO is a no-no as experience tells me it will sooner or later run into
> scalability and maintainability issues.  That makes TCL and Lua to me
> only minimally better than cmake's language in the long run.

What's the biggest build system you've yet written?  Right now I'm
messing with one that's 400MB of source code.  The main ./configure
file is 240K, pretty long and piggish.  But it's still just a big long
dumb file, something I can eyeball.  It's not an exotic OO exercise;
that would be a waste of time.  I don't claim tremendous experience at
huge build systems, but I think it would need to be 4GB of source
before I started thinking "gosh, I really could use some OO."  And I
don't think I'd be working on such a thing by my lonesome either.  The
build I'm currently working on is still graspable by 1 person, even if
it's a pig of a job to convert to CMake.

> TCL and Lua are only better for embedding if you were to need cmake to
> be multithreaded

Well that doesn't sound like the dumbest technical trick I've heard.
Could it help with parallel builds?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every