CMake vs autoconf

[Jamon Camisso]

On 1/10/2012 9:28 PM, William Park wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm now trying out Razor-qt, essentially KDE-lite.  It's okay.  Kind of
> old FVWM with KDE icons and fonts.  Anyways, Razor-qt is configured by
>     cmake .
> instead of the more usual
>     ./configure
> After that, you do
>     make; make install
> but, looking at the Makefile, it's just frontend to "cmake".
> 
> For user, I guess it doesn't matter whether it's CMake or autoconf.
> But, if anyone is writing build scripts, is it really easier?

CMake is fundamentally different in that it allows cross-platform
configuration for a variety of compilers. Whereas autotools can generate
makefiles for use with minGW on Windows, which also entails using
Cygwin, CMake can generate a makefile for use with a variety of
compilers on Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX, etc. So if you were stuck using
Visual Studio, CMake can help you there.

Another semi-direct competitor to CMake (if you want to call it
competition) is SCons, which is a fundamentally different compilation
system that relies on Python to figure out dependencies and call
compilers. It too will work on Windows, as well as any POSIX compliant
system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCons

Jamon
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists