[Aptitude-devel] Towards a better build system

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2010-04-23, Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Isn't Cmake more used? (I don't know both.)
>
>   I have no idea.  The one thing I do know about CMake is that it uses
> a private build language (like Make and BJam), which is one of the main
> things that frustrates me about autotools.

CMake is a very nice tool, which I really enjoy to work with. It is so
far the least bad[1] build system I have tried, both as a packager and as a
developer.

As a Qt coder, cmake is the most friendly build system around, and
thinking of the new "aptitude-qt" gsoc project with yours truly as a
primary mentor, cmake would be a good choice.

I'd rather stay with autotools than go with SCons, as scons is basically
a utter failure.  

A funny story around scons: At FOSDEM (large european free/opensource 
conference), a developer from some distribution held a talk about 'how
to be a good upstream'. On one of his slides, he had the text SCons with
a big red cross over. At that slide, several members of the audience,
including several debian developers smiled and agreed to that symbol.

I guess I should also put my code where my mouth is and offer to start
writing a cmake based build system for aptitude, should there be a wish
for this direction.

/Sune

[1] All build systems sucks, it is about finding the one that sucks
least.