[Python-Dev] Evaluated cmake as an autoconf replacement (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Apr 8 01:58:54 CEST 2009

Alexander Neundorf wrote:

My experience is that people don't need general computation in their build process. ... CMake supports now more general purpose programming features than it did 2 years ago, e.g. it has now functions with local variables, it can do simple math, regexps and other things.

In other words, it's growing towards being able to do general computation. Why is it doing that, if people don't need general computation in their build process?

If we get to the point where this is not enough, it usually means a real program which does real work is required. In this case it's actually a good thing to have this as a separate tool, and not mixed into the buildsystem.

There's some merit in that idea, but the build tool and the program need to work together smoothly somehow. If the build tool is implemented in Python, there's more chance of that happening (e.g. the Python code can import parts of the build system and call them directly, rather than having to generate a file in some other language).

-- Greg

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