Message-ID: <685b2f8b@news.ausics.net>
From: not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject: Re: Software Building Status. A Growing Annoyance.
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
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[ deliberately contradicting the Followup-To ]

In comp.os.linux.misc Nux Vomica <nv@linux.rocks> wrote:
> Thus, other build systems were created and more and more software
> packages are moving to them.  On contemporary GNU/Linux, the most
> commonly used alternate build systems are:
> 
> Cmake
> 
> Meson (using Ninja as backend)
> 
> So what's the problem?
> 
> The difficulty is that now the software builder has to learn
> several different systems and things are no longer as simple
> as they once were with Autotools.  Compared to Autotools, these
> alternative build systems are decidedly more complex for the
> builder even if they might make things easier for the programmer.

Indeed! I don't know if I've encountered Meson, but CMake drives
me up the wall. It's also far more restrictive for compatibility
than Autotools' configure scripts - you need a recent version of
CMake installed to build recent source code releases. The
CMake developers ignored requests for an equivalent to
"./configure --help" early on, willfully making the transition
difficult for software builders. I think they have a
Windows-centric attitude where they expect only the software
developers to be compiling things and hence making the build
settings easy to understand for others isn't a priority. Granted
if projects actually followed their advice to document the CMake
build settings they use, that would help too.

> I am always in favor of choice.  In fact, choice is one of the
> great strengths of GNU/Linux.  Yet when it comes to software
> building from source I feel that only a single protocol is
> necessary.

If looking for new software that I'll need to build myself, then
CMake is an immediate turn-off - I'll choose an alternative. It's
difficult when software I'm already building and using switches to
CMake though.

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