I am +1 with this change as well. CMake is a good choice. My other favorite project, KDE, uses CMake as well and it has worked great there ever since 2007.
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Eli Collins <e...@cloudera.com> wrote: > +1 having a build tool that supports multiple platforms is worth the > dependency. I've also had good experiences with cmake. > > > On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Colin McCabe <cmcc...@alumni.cmu.edu> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> We'd like to use CMake instead of autotools to build native (C/C++) code in >> Hadoop. There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. For one thing, it is >> not feasible to use autotools on the Windows platform, because it depends on >> UNIX shell scripts, the m4 macro processor, and some other pieces of >> infrastructure which are not present on Windows. >> >> For another thing, CMake builds are substantially simpler and faster, because >> there is only one layer of generated code. With autotools, you have automake >> generating m4 code which autoconf reads, which it uses to generate a UNIX >> shell >> script, which then generates another UNIX shell script, which eventually >> generates Makefiles. CMake simply generates Makefiles out of CMakeLists.txt >> files-- much simpler to understand and debug, and much faster. >> CMake is a lot easier to learn. >> >> automake error messages can be very, very confusing. This is because you are >> essentially debugging a pile of shell scripts and macros, rather than a >> coherent whole. So you see error messages like "autoreconf: cannot empty >> /tmp/ar0.4849: Is a directory" or "Can't locate object method "path" via >> package "Autom4te... and so forth. CMake error messages come from the CMake >> application and they almost always immediately point you to the problem. >> >> From a build point of view, the net result of adopting CMake would be that >> you >> would no longer need automake and related programs installed to build the >> native parts of Hadoop. Instead, you would need CMake installed. CMake is >> packaged by Red Hat, even in RHEL5, so it shouldn't be difficult to install >> locally. It's also available for Mac OS X and Windows, as I mentioned >> earlier. >> >> The JIRA for this work is at >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8368 >> Thanks for reading. >> >> sincerely, >> Colin -- Harsh J
