Getting ecm files from the ECM package

[Nicolás Alvarez]

2013/11/1 Kevin Ottens <ervin at kde.org>:
> Hello,
>
> On Friday 01 November 2013 11:23:14 Mirko Boehm wrote:
>> On 11/01/2013 10:46 AM, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
>> > [1] Why not merge that into CMake ? For quicker releases, and even easier
>> > contributing. Also Bill once said that in hindsight he would have prefered
>> > if cmake would not ship any find-modules itself at all. So one could
>> > imagine that cmake would come without any find-modules in the future, and
>> > all find-modules would come from a separate package, e.g. ECM.
>> > This would make cmake the core tool, and ECM its "standard library"
>>
>> I agree that a separation of CMake and the find_modules make sense. But.
>
> My position indeed. I would agree at a "tier 0" if it didn't make it miserable
> for third parties wanting to use a tier 1 library in the sense of "oh by the
> way you also need that, and that, and that thing no one else use".
>
>> Then it is time to think of a way to integrate cmake with the separate
>> source of find_modules. Algorithmically, it would look like
>>
>> PROJECT(MyApplication)
>> FIND_MODULES_REPOSITORY("http://ecm.kde.org")
>> FIND_PACKAGES(KF5 REQUIRED...)
>>
>> and so forth. That would be a real breakthrough. It is related to the
>> approach taken by Maven and others. All it takes is a built-in way for
>> CMake to download the find_modules into a cache location and update them
>> when needed, or on request.
>
> Yes, that's definitely something we've been missing for a long time compared
> to the java crowd who massively use Maven. It is an *excellent* feature, and
> would solve this kind of headaches we have with the build system.

I don't know how to even begin arguing against this, because if you
don't see how wrong it is to download stuff during compilation, I
don't know what arguments would help.

I actively avoid any build system that automatically downloads
dependencies. In fact, I avoid any tool that automatically downloads
and installs software except for my distro's package manager and
kdesrc-build. That means no easy_install, pip, rubygems, npm, maven,
or whatever NIH package manager the $language community invented now.

Maven is a disgusting monstrosity used by the Java crowd where
backwards compatibility rarely exists, and the approach to make things
not break is to make packages depend on exact versions of dependencies
and download them automatically from who-knows-where. And then the
same craziness gets copied or reinvented for other languages too.

"You don’t want a build tool which automatically downloads unresolved
dependencies before cleaning out your build output directories. You
don’t want a build tool which automatically downloads unresolved
dependencies, PERIOD! Automatically downloading unresolved
dependencies makes your build process nondeterministic!" --
http://kent.spillner.org/blog/work/2009/11/14/java-build-tools.html

I'm also surprised at "Almost everybody has internet access for build
machines". Is there *any* Linux distro where that's the case??

-- 
Nicolás