Patrice Dumas wrote:
On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:09:57PM -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
expect to see third-party flavors of CMake (the way you see various
vendor versions of e.g. sed, which have no relation to each other
besides the degree to which they implement the POSIX spec for such tool).
Why so? There could be a solaris cmake, an IRIX cmake, an HP-UX cmake...
There could be. Why are there vendor sh, sed and awk?
Because they predate GNU? Such tools existed before GNU, therefore each
vendor had to roll their own, as a result of which there are GNU, BSD,
vendor-specific, etc. versions of each, and because there were already,
there is a certain inertia in maintaining them.
Instead of asking "why not", ask *why*. I haven't heard of
vendor-specific autotools; what makes you think vendors will suddenly
roll their own CMake?
Cost of porting CMake: on POSIX platforms, about the same as autotools
or better, and unlike autotools, doable for non-UNIX-like platforms.
All the GNU POSIX utilities are portable and have been ported on many
platforms.
Sorry, but there really is not a "nice" port of bash to Windows. And the
mingw project should tell you something about the difficulty of porting
POSIX tools to non-POSIX platforms (i.e. that you have to bootstrap
something like a POSIX libc before you can even start).
At *worst* you'd have to do something similar for CMake. In reality,
CMake doesn't have that problem because it doesn't need to look like
POSIX, it just needs to look like CMake, which means it can adapt much
more readily to the native environment.
Autotools *needs* a POSIX environment, which means on non-POSIX
platforms you have to bring along all that baggage. On the plus side,
your application code doesn't have to be as portable, but you don't have
the *ability* to build native applications on some platforms (e.g.
Windows). CMake itself doesn't need all that, so it's only needed (and
even then, only the runtime, not all the supporting programs) if the
application needs it.
--
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
--
For great justice!! -- Captain (Zero Wing)
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