[CMake] Re: CMake and Lua

[Brandon Van Every]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Rodolfo Schulz de Lima
<rodolfo at rodsoft.org> wrote:
> Alexander Neundorf escreveu:
>
> > The build system should provide what you need without requiring that you
>  > actually need to program something.
>
>  I think this statement is true regarding the most common building use
>  cases. But the build system should not limit what you can do in more
>  elaborate building situations, or turning it into a difficult and
>  verbose task. Using a more powerful script language doesn't imply that
>  the build script will be more complex. It can be quite the opposite, IMHO.

I'd like to see practical examples of such complexity requirements,
that get solved by more powerful scripting languages.  It seems this
kind of proposition is usually made in a vacuum, out of a theoretical
fear.  I've made some effort to "get out there" and try to understand
other build systems, but I'm too lazy to really really keep searching
for this.  I do know that every time I've asked so far, nobody's
offered it.  I hope I can goad someone into delivering the goods.  I'd
like to see a tangible demonstration of why the scripting technology
matters.

I've also concluded that for small to medium sized projects, of 100K
lines of code or less, the build system technology is irrelevant.
There's not enough of a build to worry about far-flung complexity
requirements.  Case in point: Chicken Scheme was a 70K LOC project.
It had complexity disproportionate to its size because it was a
bootstrapping compiler, with lotsa Scheme stuff driven by
add_custom_command.  Once the Chicken author got tired of having to
learn anything about CMake, and once I got tired of his attitude, what
did he do?  Dumped MSVC support, dumped CMake, dumped Autoconf, and
went back to handwritten Makefiles.  Pretty reasonable approach if you
don't care about MSVC.

>From a complexity standpoint, I don't take the opinions of
small-to-medium sized projects seriously anymore.  They have a
perceived need to do anything imaginable, because they don't actually
know enough about build systems to know what's really required.
Small-to-medium sized projects are a documentation and marketing
problem, not a technical problem.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every