4 ms·

Spare your fingers ;) - you'll never convince anybody of the value of cmake by telling them about it. You just have to put them in a situation where they're loo

by tom_ 8y ago

Spare your fingers ;) - you'll never convince anybody of the value of cmake by telling them about it. You just have to put them in a situation where they're looking after a program that has to build on multiple desktop platforms, and they'll figure it out eventually... (The combination I've always had to deal with is Linux, OS X and Windows/VC++ - but any combination that includes both Windows/VC++ and a POSIX-type OS is probably enough to make it worthwhile. The POSIX/non-POSIX differences are rather annoying to deal with otherwise, and that quite apart from how most Windows programmers will quite reasonably want to use a Visual Studio project rather than a Makefile.) 506c

enriquto 8y ago
I hope this day never arrives for me... In any case, if I ever had to compile something for windows I would rather install cygwin and a posix toolchain than cmake and visual studio.
deleted 8y ago
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AHTERIX5000 8y ago
Yeah, CMake and autotools solve different problems than make. I'm definitely not a fan of either one but if I need to really distribute and compile something on more than one OS there isn't much of a choice. The posted makefile example fails right away on multiple platforms since headers are often in somewhere else than in /usr/include directly, for example in Debian the right (atm) path would be /usr/include/libpng16 and Makefile does not handle that.
- enriquto 8y ago
  > The posted makefile example fails right away on multiple platforms since headers are often in somewhere else And that's the intended behavior. Finding system headers around your disk is not a problem that a build system must try to solve. This is the task of a distribution or a packaging system, which is a different problem as you say.
  - AHTERIX5000 8y ago
    Yeah I agree, it's not the ideal situation but it is the real world. Simple makefiles do not work often and there are systems that can solve the problem. Not elegant, brilliantly designed tools but ones that work anyway.

by tom_ 8y ago

enriquto 8y ago

I hope this day never arrives for me... In any case, if I ever had to compile something for windows I would rather install cygwin and a posix toolchain than cmake and visual studio.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

AHTERIX5000 8y ago

Yeah, CMake and autotools solve different problems than make. I'm definitely not a fan of either one but if I need to really distribute and compile something on more than one OS there isn't much of a choice. The posted makefile example fails right away on multiple platforms since headers are often in somewhere else than in /usr/include directly, for example in Debian the right (atm) path would be /usr/include/libpng16 and Makefile does not handle that.

enriquto 8y ago
> The posted makefile example fails right away on multiple platforms since headers are often in somewhere else And that's the intended behavior. Finding system headers around your disk is not a problem that a build system must try to solve. This is the task of a distribution or a packaging system, which is a different problem as you say.
- AHTERIX5000 8y ago
  Yeah I agree, it's not the ideal situation but it is the real world. Simple makefiles do not work often and there are systems that can solve the problem. Not elegant, brilliantly designed tools but ones that work anyway.