David, I worked with the people at Kitware, Inc. for a while (here in beautiful upstate New York), and they wrote and maintain CMake [1]. I believe KDE, IIRC, has used CMake for a while now (which is at least a testament to the complexity it can handle).
IMHO, CMake does not have a great syntax, but it's easy to learn and write. Again, IMHO, orders of magnitude easier to understand than GNU auto*tools -- although it is a bit pedantic (e.g. closing if branches with the condition to match the opening). However, for all its faults, it's *really* easy to use, and the for-free GUIs (ncurses or multi-platforms' GUIs), are icing on the cake. The simple ncurses GUI is nice to have when reconfiguring a project -- it can really speed things up. > stuff like "has vsnprintf?" that configure deals with.) In addition, > it'd be nice to be able to have options like "debugging", "release", > "grof-compiled", etc, similar to procesor specification. > It would be preferrable if all > object files and executables could coexist (because it's a C++ > template heavy CMake can do all this for you, and it works great with C and C++ projects (really, that's the only reason one would use it). 2ยข, __armando [1] http://cmake.org/
