[Qt-interest] which build tools to use?

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 11.12.09 15:12:32, Stephen Collyer wrote:
> 2009/12/5 Gordon Schumacher <gordon at rebit.com>
> 
> >
> > Unfortunately, my present opinion is that *all* the currently
> > available build tools suffer from one or more major shortcoming (and
> > please note "major" in that sentence).  That said, CMake is IMHO the
> > lesser evil at present for building Qt or portable C++ projects.  Its
> > syntax is inconsistent and its documentation is sorely lacking in some
> > places... but it (mostly) knows how to handle Qt4 projects out of the
> > box, and you're not likely to run into the major issues unless you're
> > trying to do something especially unusual or complex.
> >
> 
> I would agree strongly with this. CMake is probably the best option
> available at the moment for cross-platform building, but it's complex and
> the documentation is dismal at best, and non-existent at worst (did anyone
> ever document CPack, for example ? Last time I looked there was next to
> nothing).
>
> In addition, although CMake in principle supports the locating of 3rd party
> libraries via module files, these tend to lag new releases of software, and
> I've found that I've had to do painful hacking on various platforms to get
> them to work (FindBoost.cmake, I'm looking at you ...).

Well, one should note that the way Boost installs itself is rather
problematic which causes most of the problems for the cmake module. And
then there's the windows-factor, where there's basically no "standard"
on directory layout of a package or general standard on where things
should be put.

IMHO CMake is one of the best-documented buildtools out there, the only
thing that I've seen has more complete docs is ant (and those are
relatively bad-structured IMHO). 

Andreas

-- 
Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.