[Nix-dev] Re: scons / cmake

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

pjotr2008 at thebird.nl (Pjotr Prins) writes:

> What is the preferred autoconf replacement with NIX expressions at
> this point - scons or cmake? I can see cmake is well supported and
> used in KDE for one, but the use of scons looks less obvious in
> applications/networking/p2p/ldcpp/1.0.1.nix. What are the
> implications for cross-architecture building?

FWIW, I think Nix would have been next-to-impossible without the
infrastructure brought by `configure', namely all the `--prefix' and
`--XXXdir' switches, which make Autoconf-based packages easily
installable anywhere on the file system.

Packaging software that uses home-made build systems usually proves to
be much less automatic and more painful because of this.

I think CMake supports similar configure-time options.  I don't know
whether SCons does.  If you're familiar with Automake, you might want to
look at Quagmire, a promising Automake replacement which also provides
`configure'-like features: http://code.google.com/p/quagmire/ .

Thanks,
Ludovic.