dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <jjan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 04:48:19PM +0200, Anders Logg wrote:
> As promised, I have now put up test builds for DOLFIN with Autotools,
> SCons and CMake. Thanks to Arve Knudsen for putting together the
> builds. The packages can be found here:
> 
>   http://www.fenics.org/pub/software/misc/build-tests-2006-10-24/
> 
> This is a stripped-down version of DOLFIN with just a few of the
> libraries (linear algebra and dependencies) and one simple demo.
> 
> I ask anyone who is interested to download and compare the three
> different builds of DOLFIN and submit any comments to dolfin-dev.
> 

Excellent tests. From a complexity and cleanliness perspective, CMake
and SCons look very much better than autoconf. I assume they perform
essentially the same basic capabilities well (i.e. dependency
generation) or they wouldn't have become established.

The only question I have is if tests are standardized. Autoconf has a
macro archive:

http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/

Which enables you to include a macro and then for example put:

AC_PYTHON_DEVEL

to check for a Python development environment.

This seems to be a similar repository for SCons:

http://www.scons.org/wiki/SconsRecipes

I found an algorithm for converting autoconf macros to CMake, so
perhaps this isn't such a big issue:

http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2003-November/004468.html

A big point against autoconf is that macros have to be written in the
M4 macro language (on top of sh). I guess macros are written in Python
for SCons and in the CMake macro language for CMake? This would be a
point in favor of SCons, since I don't see why there has to be a new
language introduced.

  Johan