Okay, after my last post where I discussed waf, I've been pointed to cmake. This is what KDE4 will use, and is meant to be better than automake.
I'll cut to my personal conclusions:
- cmake would need lots of GNOME-specific extra modules written (for instance gnome-doc-utils) and POTFILES support.
- cmake is fast to configure and build and has pretty output
- cmake syntax is much more concise and easy to learn than m4
- It's not obvious how you enable make dist or make check, although I'm new to all this
- cmake has an optional gui based (easier to use in my opinion) configuration system.
- Lots of useful modules have already been written, for example pkg_check_modules
- Executing stuff like “libtool –mode=execute dbus-binding-tool” is quite difficult, although this should probably be wrapped up and abstracted in a module.
- There are not that many standards in cmake, for example do you include directories before or after you've checked for dependencies? There would need to be GNOME guidelines on this sort of stuff.
- The supplied examples are really simple, which don't help much.
- It's a single system-wide install leaving single CMakeLists.txt in each directory. Very clean.
- It's an established product with many people supporting it.
I have done some testing with gnome-power-manager and found it to be stable, and fast – although it does require you practically re-writing how the build is done.
So, anybody had any good or bad experiences with cmake? Thanks.