Murray's Blog

Trying qmake and CMake

Until this week I was not familiar with qmake and CMake because I am a fairly satisfied user of autotools. I have not forgotten how strange it was when I first learned it, when there was no decent documentation, but things are much better now. I feel at home with it and I like how other systems and distros expect the standard “configure;make all install” steps. I am definitely biased against the use of other build systems.

However, these days I have to deal with code that uses qmake and CMake and I can’t just be stubbornly ignorant. So I tried an experiment. I created branches of a little (but real-world) project that uses Qt and an extra library via pkg-config: qlom with qmake, and qlom with cmake. The master branch uses non-recursive autotools.

I was not impressed. Please do add comments to correct me. I’d particular like patches that make my errors crystal clear and prove that it’s all much better than I think. I am capable of admitting error and changing my mind when appropriate.

Bad Documentation. Weird Syntax

Just like autotools, neither were easy to get started with. The documentation is fragmented, unclear, and incomplete. I found qmake easier than CMake, but that’s probably just because qmake does much less. Nevertheless, CMake has a real problem with documentation and in general, as a widely-used open-source project, it deserves a better infrastructure.

They both suffer from one major problem shared by autotools: They have evolved over enough time that Google will happily return out-of-date examples and documentation, making the syntax seem more varied than it really is. I wish that autotools could force me not to use deprecated syntax. I don’t know if qmake and CMake can.

As with autotools there’s a heavy dose of arbitrariness:

No Respect For pkg-config

I am dismayed that CMake expects people to write code for “Find” modules for each library they might use, while having poor support for the generic pkg-config solution. A project’s list of dependencies is data, not an excuse to write code. More code means more problems.

In fact, after several days of trying, I still can’t figure out how to use pkg-config with cmake, so my glom_cmake branch is not finished yet.

Most libraries provide the simple .pc files these days. The autotools PKG_CHECK_MODULES() macro makes it very easy to check for several dependencies at once. CMake feels too much like the bad old 90s when we suffered fragile copy-paste-hacked config scripts, custom m4, macros and verbose build files with separate CFLAGS and LIBS variables for each dependency, and inconsistent release-version and API-version checking.

I understand that pkg-config is not popular on Windows or MacOS, and that those are awkward platforms to work with, but:

CMake’s use of scripts just spreads the chaos to Linux instead of keeping things simple on Linux and improving the other platforms too.

No Configure Stage

With qmake, I really miss having a proper configure stage, with the resulting config.h so my code can use ifdefs. I like seeing a list of documented build options from configure –help, which neither qmake or cmake offer.

CMake can generate a config.h, at least. However,

Install is an Afterthought

Both CMake and qmake require explicit extra syntax to actually install the built executable. With autotools you get this for free when using the regular bin_PROGRAMS to specify the executable name, though libraries do need more explicit instructions to install the correct headers in the correct place.

Also, qmake and CMake have no make distcheck for making source tarball releases.

This makes sense slightly because CMake (and maybe qmake) aim to support Windows, Mac, and Linux equally, and Windows has no real convention for installation of built-from-source binaries. CMake (and maybe qmake) generate convenient Visual Studio and X-Code project files, for instance. But the end results it that Linux and Linux conventions are not fully supported, so they feel like major regressions compared to autotools.

(note: removed my nonsense with the TODO about the location of .o files.)

Summary

In summary, I think:

I understand the wish to support Windows and Mac-specific build systems such as Visual Studio and X-Code. I just don’t like how qmake and cmake do that, and for me it’s not worth making things worse on Linux. Still, I’ll have to use these in some existing projects, so I’m glad that I’m more familiar with them now.

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