Re: The build system

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2010/7/8 John Swensen <address@hidden>:

> Looking at the CMake website, it looks like there are binary
> distributions of CMake for Windows, Linux, OSX, SUNOS, IRIX, HPUX,
> and AIX.

They pay lip service to other Unices, but the fact is that CMake just
doesn't have all the years of clever hacks that configure scripts have
for checking for system properties. You can write your own for CMake,
but if your goal is to have maximum Unix portability, you're best off
using GNU. Also, from personal experience using CMake, I can tell you
that sometimes it can be a challenge to get the CMake binary for
whatever non-Mac non-Windows platform you're on, although as CMake
gets more popular, this is changing.

CMake is certainly faster, mostly because it doesn't rely on shell
scripts. It's also easier to learn because instead of using three or
four different tools and languages to build, you only use one (with
its own quirks, but surmountable). It has "automatic" dependency
resolution and other nice features, but whether it's for Octave is
probably hard to tell until someone actually tries to use it for
Octave.