[petsc-dev] those who use cmake are SANE

["C. Bergström"]

On 11/12/13 03:20 AM, Matthew Knepley wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov 
> <mailto:bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>> wrote:
>
>
>        Man o man, it is worse than autoconf (how is that possible?)
>
>
> Its the essential masochism of programming, where shitty interfaces 
> are elevated to
> grand status because some people can cope with them. Notice that this 
> phenomenon
> also appears in mathematics.
Just a drive-by comment, but I can't help add to some flames to this
Are you people on drugs?

1) My personal hands on experience - I'd rather deal with cmake syntax 
than m4 any day of the week
2) cmake is super easy to bootstrap everywhere - autocrap and all the 
auto* stuff is a bitch by comparison
3) cmake is more or less portable and adding new backends is possible 
(ninja)
4) cmake projects typically lack the idiot proof ./configure --help 
option list, but there is ccmake (which I've never used). (Internally we 
overcome this with good documentation)
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I know of some complaints about the cmake codebase itself - I'm not 
going to comment on those.

cmake may leave a rash, but better than having gangrene aka autoconf
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More productively - Specific complaints about cmake? Have any of those 
complaints been raised on the cmake developers list? In my experience 
they are quite responsive