On 07.12.10 23:52:10, Andreas Pakulat wrote: > On 07.12.10 13:14:19, Paul Dean wrote: > > > > I've been using CMAKE for a few years now and I absolutley LOVE it. > > It makes my life as a programmer so much easier to be able to generate > > project files on any platform. > > > > What hurts is doing the reverse. I can't count how many hours I've spent > > converting Solutions, Projects and Makefiles into CmakeLists files. > > > > I think if CMAKE could generate CMakeLists files from Solutions, Projects > > and Makefiles, it would be the ULTIMATE make system. > > Just think. Any time you run into some sorcecode that does not have a > > CMakeFile, you could generate it from the Makefile or Project. > > > > I can't imagine any programmer that would not love that ability. I think > > it would be something great to add to CMAKE. > > What are everyones thoughts on that? > > See my answer to John, basically I doubt this is actually possible, > except for very static project-files like may VS solutions are. For > Makefile's or other build-tools like qmake its not going to work as they > allow arbitrary commands to be executed at any point. You may be able to > convert the files on a syntactic level, but that doesn't guarantee you > they're semantically equivalent. And I bet in most cases (except very > trivial ones) the generated CMake files will look very un-cmake'ish. > > Not to mention configure-scripts written in some shell-language or as > C++ app... > > Also whats the point of being able to generate cmake files from "any" > project files? If I just want to build the project then I can just as > well use the existing buildsystem to build. Why bother installing cmake, > if VS is already installed and the project has a solution file? > > If you want to port a project to cmake, you'll probably also end up > restructuring some things wrt. the buildsystem, so a human needs to do > the conversion anyway (and automatic conversion will be ugly, see > above). > > This is similar to automatic translation of languages. Yes todays tools > that do this are good enough so that you can get the meaning of a text > for many cases. But they're still not good enough to match what a native > speaker would've written or to be able to translate any arbitrary text > (especially 'slang', scientific texts etc. are causing problems for such > tools).
PS: All the above doesn't mean I think conversion-tools are totally useless. In fact the automake-to-cmake tool I think is very useful to get a basic skeleton cmake project up in no time. That way one can concentrate on the 'real work', i.e. porting the library/feature checks and making sure that includes and link-libs are set up correctly. Andreas -- You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep. _______________________________________________ Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake