Re: [Boost-build] Future development

From: Larry Evans (cppljevans_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-05 14:26:59

On 10/05/07 11:55, David Abrahams wrote:
 > on Fri Oct 05 2007, "Ray Lambert" <codemonkey-AT-interthingy.net> wrote:
[snip]
 >> Dave, I respect your opinions and your choice of tools, even if I don't
 >> agree with them.  But I also have my own opinions and choices based on
 >> many, many years in this profession.  You don't have to agree with them
 >> but there they are nonetheless.
 >
 > Yeah, but I'm not interested in my opinion (I don't have much of one
 > in this area yet) or -- I'm sorry -- in your opinion.  I'm interested
 > in finding some fairly objective criteria and or empirical data by
 > which we can make a decision about the use of Cmake.  So far, the
 > technical arguments in favor of using Cmake sound pretty compelling to
 > me.  The only plausible technical arguments that I've heard against it
 > so far are Rene's about maintenance and testing, and I'd like to check
 > those against people's real experiences.  If Cmake works as I
 > understand it to, it relies only on the features of the underlying
 > make system that just have to work, and work well, or make wouldn't be
 > able to build anything -- so it's hard to see where the testing
 > nightmare comes from.

Dave, because I was having trouble with BB, I tried CMake briefly
around August.  It was hard to specify a different compiler, as
described here:

http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2007/08/126117.php

I guess this qualifies as "empirical data".  After that
CMake experience, I went back to BB to see if I could understand
it (in particular the extending) better.  I'm still trying :(.

Another difficulty with CMake may be *related* to a difficulty with
the boost preprocessing library.  I often had to use Make to specify
the compiler option (e.g. g++ -E) to produce the preprocessor output
before I could understand why my preprocessing wasn't doing what I
expected.  The preprocessor output is analogous to the Makefiles
produced by CMake.  Since the preprocessor output had source line
numbers associated with it, I could see approximately where the
problem was occurring.  I also ran the output through a filter to
strip out the output before the preprocessing done by my macros
occurred.  However, I'm wondering if the Makefiles produced by CMake
have the same or similar traceback feature to allow debugging.
OTOH, although bjam has debug options, I've also found those are
oftimes hard to follow.

Anyway, as yet, I've no firm conclusions about which is best; however,
the above problems with CMake might be worth considering.