[Bf-committers] New Developer Meeting minutes

[James Deery]

I'll throw my opinion in, if any one wants it. I'm quite new to the blender sources and when I initially checked out blender I followed the instructions to build using scons. This worked perfectly first time and I was happy. When I started playing with things, I set up scons as an external build script in Xcode so I could use the debugger. I was quickly frustrated by the fact that scons would take ages about deciding that it didn't need to do anything when I just wanted to test out a small change.

I heard about CMake and set up an Xcode project. This worked and I was able quickly build and debug from Xcode. For some reason loading images with these builds didn't work and I couldn't see any relevant configuration options, but that didn't matter for what I was working on. So now I use the CMake generated Xcode project to develop with and scons to make "proper" builds.

If CMake "just worked" like scons did then I would use it all the time. Maybe I should have spent some time configuring CMake, but I shouldn't need to and I have no motivation to now since I have a setup that works. 

So CMake is definitely better to develop with, but since no one is making sure it always "just works" as seems to be the case with scons, it's not quite as reliable for building blender for actual use.

James

On 14 Jan 2010, at 22:28, Mike Pan wrote:

> As mentioned before, I think one of the key benefit of cmake is the ability
> to generate solution/project files.  This might be not be a huge deal to
> seasoned coders, but for beginner coders who just wants to explore the
> Blender source code a bit, having an IDE like Visual Studio really helps.
> 
> -mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:21 PM, joe <joeedh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Sounds like us scons people need to try out cmake.  See how good it
>> is.  I don't have time now, but will try to get to it.  Also need to
>> look at how easy it is to maintain, that's one of the really nice
>> things about scons.
>> 
>> Joe
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 6:04 AM, Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva
>> <miguelf at ieee.org> wrote:
>>> 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
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