18 Mar
2025
18 Mar
'25
7:39 p.m.
I didn’t much care for it myself (and fortunately, it wasn’t my job to
maintain the build production). It at least gave us common tools for
Windoze and UNIX.
------ Original Message ------
From "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com>
To tuhs(a)tuhs.org
Date 3/18/2025 3:09:09 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
At 2025-03-18T12:03:48-0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald
Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
I believe the usual rejoinder here is "worse is better".
My experiences with CMake are not happy ones.
Regards,
Branden
We eventually switched to CMAKE.
Yikes. That's not what I would call an improvement!
I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.
At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
basic form it could be highly performant. It was simple tool for using
other tools in an innovative way. As used by X11 though it was part of
what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.
CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
unpalatable dog's breakfast. It also abuses other tools, requires hours
to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
nothing else.