2014-01-30 Joel Holdsworth <joel@...1709...>:
From my experience CMake is a lot easier to use and more widely used than waf. We use waf at work, and it's ok - but not easy to use unless you really know python.
CMake requires you to learn a frustratingly weak and idiosyncratic scripting language which is only useful in CMake (and even there barely so), whereas learning Python is generally useful, especially to a programmer coming from a Java / C / C++ background.
Also CMake has a much larger community around it - hence support for Ninja, MSVC etc., wheras we find ourselves mostly talking directly to the Waf guy.
That's true; on the other hand, it's much easier to add something to Waf.
Also Debian refused to package waf because it wants to be a packaging system which clashes with their own packaging system.
Debian refused to package Waf for different reasons: 1. Originally the Waf tarball contained non-free docs (CC-BY-ND or something similar); it no longer contains them 2. The maintainer insisted that Waf should not be installed system-wide due to potential incompatibilities between versions 3. Most projects included the "Waf binary", a compressed version of Waf codw with stripped comments, which Debian says is incompatible with DFSG; this can be avoided by including the source distribution, which is only a little bigger.
The downside of CMake is the rather weird language of CMake files.
That's a pretty big downside IMO, see above.
All that being said, if there's a consensus we should use CMake, I'll go along with that
Regards, Krzysztof