[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily garbage we put up with

[Richard]

In article
<CAL4LZyiPGTiAb_AAePDD95Si+=jPYK1K9om_Cz+cg9RJ5JiHVw at mail.gmail.com>,
    John Floren <john at jfloren.net> writes:

> I have worked with CMake and found it almost unusable, the sort of
> over-complicated thing a C++ programmer would be so pleased with--he's
> done something *clever*, and in only 50,000 lines of code! Give me a
> good old-fashioned Makefile any day.

"good old-fashioned Makefiles" are the things that got you autoconf.

Makefiles are a unix-centric way of looking at things.  If all you
ever cared about was unix, it's fine.  If you need to move beyond it,
it's a rats nest of problems.

I say this as someone who routinely works at a major silicon valley
company with a huge pile of stuff that's been created in-house on top of
raw make in order to render make portable.  It can be done, but
compared to just learning and using CMake, it's 1000x more expensive.

Of course, this stuff was created over 10+ years so the benefit of
switching now to CMake is minimal for the company, so we keep making
giant GNU make things.
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