[Bf-committers] New Developer Meeting minutes

[Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Mats Holmberg wrote:
> On 12.1.2010, at 8.39, Nathan Letwory wrote:
>> 2010/1/12 Erwin Coumans:
>>> I'm surprised of so much resistance among the Blender developers
>>> to such a nice build system as cmake.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Erwin
>>
>> We can also reverse the question - we have a very nice and working
>> SCons system. Why would you want to get rid of the nice system I
>> created?
>>
>> "I'm surprised at the resistance among certain people to such a nice
>> build system as SCons"
>
> Just to comment on this: I know nothing about the hassle that is required for maintaining any of these systems, but from a Blender user standpoint scons is very easy to use. As Nathan said, I do "svn up && python scons/scons.py" and that's all that's ever needed. During the years, I haven't seen anything being even close to that kind of ease of use.
>
> Dont' take that away, please!
>
> -mats

I'm not a community member, so please pardon the intrusion (I am
interested in blender, have compiled it with the cmake system, and I
am looking forward to contributing to it in the future, but haven't
had the time yet...).

However, I just started reading this thread and it seems to me there
is a lot of resistance, as Erwin mentions, to cmake without real
justification. Although I understand the why, I think the arguments
against CMake are not well founded. Most, if not all, of the problems
that have been mentioned are related to rules either not updated or
wrongly written in the CMakeLists.txt. These are issues with the build
system maintainers not with CMake's capabilities. With properly
written and maintained CMake files you would have both a very powerful
command line based system and an equally powerful IDE based system.

For example, the argument of ease of use can certainly be used as a
positive aspect of scons, but I find it to be unfounded when arguing
against CMake. That is because I do the following version of "svn up
&& python scons/scons.py" to build my projects, not only on Ubuntu but
on Windows:

ctest -S simple_ctest_script.cmake

With a small script ctest will: update (from svn,cvs,hg,etc),
configure, build, test, and submit the build to a dashboard (or any
subset of these steps).

Again, I don't want to argue against scons, but I think that arguments
against cmake are not really flaws of cmake but rather bad experiences
because of not knowing how to do things (either from part of the user
or the build system maintainer) and not giving it enough of a chance.
I think that if the blender community really gives cmake a chance, it
will not be dissapointed with the clean, simple, and flexible product
that cmake can provide. Whether it should then replace, coexist, etc.
with scons is a discussion that I wouldn't feel comfortable providing
any input on.

Just my $0.02,
--Miguel