Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

> I've used autotools for decades because everything else is worse.

I take it you've used CMake - could you explain in which ways you think it's worse than autotools? I agree it has concerning design flaws, but they don't come anywhere close to autotools' and I'd say CMake is overall dozens of times saner.

View on HN

Does CMake generate a deliverable which builds on a machine that doesn't have CMake installed? With full incremental build support and all, so reasonable development can take place on that system?

Yes to the first question, it generates platform-specific build files (e.g. Makefiles for Unix/Linux), which don't need cmake itself to build the software. Regarding the second question, I believe so, but I'm not sure.

Can we give everyone exactly the same tarball of a project and just have it unpack and build on their platform?

I think so, if you pre-generate the build files for every platform and distribute them all in the tarball.

Haha

Of course once the makefile is generated, there is no need to use cmake (as long as the project is not modified), but you cannot share a makefile generated by cmake, not even redistribute it. You cannot even re/locate it on your hard drive.

The difference is that autotools generates source distributions that do not need autotools to build, while a cmake project always requires cmake when building.

Oh, I wasn't aware it wasn't distributable, my bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com