[CMake] FOSDEM Talk on CMake is available

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-04-02 16:29+0200 Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:

> Quoting Alberto Luaces <aluaces at udc.es>:
>
>> Wow, many thanks for these slides!
>
> There is an updated version, which adds Alexanders's comments:
> http://www.elpauer.org/stuff/learning_cmake.pdf
>

I had a quick read through that pdf, and, in general, I liked it.  However,
I do have some suggestions for improvement.

(1) I thought the discussion of the important variables needed expanding a
bit (more than just mentioning their names).

(2) The cpack section needs expansion (especially since cpack is so poorly
documented elsewhere).

(3) I thought your comment "Try to avoid it, as it is not always installed"
about pkg-config needs some rephrasing since pkg-config is the Linux gold
standard for how Linux software packages publish compile and link flags for
their project, and many Mac OS X software packages use it as well.  Thus,
pkg-config is absolutely required for projects like PLplot to discover those
flags for external dependencies. As more and more Linux projects are ported
to other platforms, pkg-config will become ever more important on those
other platforms as well.  The pkg-config developers have already anticipated
this cross-platform need.  It is available on Unix/Linux/Mac OS X and also
windows.  For the latter case it has a number of special options for dealing
with windows idiosyncrasies such as the special form of windows paths.
(There was a prior thread here on pkg-config for windows, and the
windows-only developers at that time confirmed that the tool ran without
obvious problems on windows, but they were completely unaware of those
special options for the windows case [as I was at the time as well].)

In sum, pkg-config is already widely used on the Linux/Mac OS X side of
things and there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason to discourage the
use of pkg-config on windows even though most windows-only developers are
currently completely unaware of how useful pkg-config can be.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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