William A. Hoffman billlist at nycap.rr.com
Wed Mar 15 16:54:56 CET 2006


At 10:28 AM 3/15/2006, R.F. Pels wrote:
>On Wednesday 15 March 2006 01.52, Matt Rogers wrote:
> Correct. In fact, it would be ideal IMHO if I could load a project that
> relies on the automake system and instruct the current kdevelop to switch
> over to the cmake build system.

>> Please feel free to start coding it yourself then. None of us who work on
>> kdevelop have enough time for that. :(

I think what was being talked about here was the automatic conversion
of existing automake projects, not the creation of new cmake projects.

>Which makes me very wary about how long it will actually take. I'm afraid that 
>this answer implies that even when KDE4 is out it will take considerable time 
>for cmake support in kdevelop to materialize. If that happens we're going to 
>end up in a situation where kdevelop users are going to end up in a position 
>where kdevelop simply lacks a project manager for cmake projects while they 
>are unable to use automake projects because KDE4 does not support that 
>buildsystem anymore.
>
>Let me reiterate and please enlighten me if I'm wrong here:
>
>- cmake has support for parallel compilation

Correct, cmake generates makefiles that work with make -jN.
Also, Visual Studio project files and Xcode support parallel builds.

>- cmake maintainers are actively supporting in making cmake the 
>  KDE4 buildsystem

Yes, we are.

>- cmake can generate kdevelop project files

Yes it can.

>- cmake documentation seems to me as flimsy at best

It is getting better.   There is a book, and every command
in cmake is documented in the code, and can be accessed with
cmake --help-command, on the web, and in the man page.  Also,
there is a wiki, and an active mailing list.  However, as with
any project the docs can always be improved.


>- without some handholding, new KDE developers need to climb the
>  cmake learning curve, which might be not so difficult for those
>  accustomed to automake or qmake or similar, but can be quite
>  daunting for those accustomed to using a project manager such as
>  in Visual Whatever for example.

CMake generates visual Whatever projects, so developers can use the tools they
like.  For common simple things like adding a new file, it is very easy to
modify the cmake input files.

-Bill 



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