[ros-dev] cmake rant

[Amine Khaldi]

Hi,

Being one of the "CMake people", I'm obviously biased toward the adoption ;)

Seriously, it's the logical/rational thing to do.

That said, I just committed a temporary revert so that backtraces are 
reliable again and CMake adoption can really be possible now.

I also want to make sure everyone understands one thing: CMake is 
awesome for us. CMake allows us to have our build system maintained by 
3rd party. It allows us to have simple, readable build system 
macros/functions which means anyone can hack them. It allows us to 
support several ways to compile ros (CMake generators), from using xcode 
to eclipse to VS to nmake and (mingw/unix) make files. It allows us to 
have the MSVC builds we always have been wanting.

There is one tiny catch though: because of the excellent dependency 
tracking, CMake build can be significantly slower compared to rbuild 
build. You won't notice this if you check dependencies yourself and use 
make module/fast, but if you compile full bootcd for example you'll 
notice that it takes a moment to do dependency checking. This very 
slowness is nothing compared to rbuild looping around itself n times 
though ;)

As I'm sure you realize, it's not just about speed. The features we gain 
are well worth it.

As final note: rest assured that we will do our best to make the CMake 
build as fast as possible.

Regards,
Amine.