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Yet another CMake Blog

Sunday, 6 August 2006  |  Rich

Since everyone else is blogging on build systems today, I thought I'd join in. Overall CMake seems to be working out ok, but like anything else, it is not without its problems. One problem I had with it was fixed in the new release this weekend though - you no longer need to write:

IF something
  do stuff
ELSE something
  do other stuff
ENDIF something

I don't understand why it was written like that in the first place, but hey it's fixed so lets move on.

The other issue I have is more serious - the command line usage is frankly awful. Accordingly I'd like to know what people would like to see in a 'configure' wrapper script that lets you invoke cmake without -DSOME_VERY_OBSCURE_COMMAND in order to something as simple as tell it where to install. The things that I think need to be in there so far are:

  • --prefix
  • --debug
  • --qt-dir
  • --kde-dir
  • An option for passing raw cmake options for stuff not covered by the wrapper.
Anything else that should be provided?