On May 13, 2007, at 12:00 PM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
I think I won't be alone in saying that people who have been burnt by the sheer nightmare that is writing a Makefile and maintaining it (even with the autotools) welcome the breeze that is Boost.Build and Boost.Jam . I don't know if it might be the name "CMake" but anything (IMO) remotely related to Make just turns me and a lot of developers who've dealt with it before away.
CMake is a cross-platform makefile/project generator. Much of what you like about bjam and BBv2---the ability to specify platform- independent build rules, etc.---is also available in CMake.
It might be a naive question, but why can't we let these build-system specific files reside in the distribution and let users pick which one works for them? I'm positive we can make the CMake and Boost.Build stuff reside in the same distribution and not have to abandon one in favor of another.
Can we really maintain two separate build systems? And keep them synchronized? That has the potential to be far worse than the status quo.
So personally, I'd like to still stick with Boost.Build and Boost.Jam -- and hope we can articulate the requirements somehow and file tickets for them so people can actually pick up where others left off and improve Boost.Build and Boost.Jam for everyone's sake. That however doesn't mean I would reject a well-meant effort of putting in the CMake build instructions/files into the distribution just as long as BBv2 and Boost.Jam stay.
At this point, I don't think it makes sense for anyone to have made up their mind, given than so few people are familiar with CMake. - Doug