Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
Maybe you can offer an alternative? And no, I don't mean
reciting names
of some hacks some cool kids may have put together for their birthday...
CMake, but...
And not something that requires me to install it first before I can
build
this tarball I downloaded.
... this requirement is broken by design. As Conrad points out, you have to
install tools such as GCC, Binutils and Make anyway, why not CMake?
The perverse idea of allowing to build software using a certain build system
without actually installing that build system in the main reason the
autotools suck as much as they do. (It means relying on slow shell code
which is really ugly because it has to work around bugs of various obscure
systems' shells, and it means autogenerating files and passing them off
as "source code".) Not to mention that a *nix shell is actually harder to
install than a CMake binary on some systems. (Not all the world is a *nix.)
How hard is it to "yum install cmake"?
Kevin Kofler