I confess I have not spent much time with Cmake. My experience has not
been great, but that is simply being used to configure, so it is not a
valid excuse.
What would be really good to have is something like the old configure -h
or --help, but for Cmake, so one can have a simple list of options for
building some things but not others, etc.
Is this possible ?
Thanks
adrian
On 4/4/21 9:45 PM, David A Case wrote:
> [External Email]
>
> On Sun, Apr 04, 2021, Scott Le Grand wrote:
>
>> I'm open to someone convincing me cmake is better than the configure
>> script, but no one has made that argument yet beyond "because cmake"...
> Jamie's arguments on behalf of CMake are summarized here:
>
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__ambermd.org_pmwiki_pmwiki.php_Main_CMakeFeatures&d=DwICAg&c=sJ6xIWYx-zLMB3EPkvcnVg&r=dl7Zd5Rzbdvo14I2ndQf4w&m=INvAHXgX-h1G-P3139lTlq4ECQwScVEwfHSCAxx5McM&s=lvYt-moqgilmPUVncSdTq_AILPkI4nmWf1DnVYNqeDk&e=
>
> (There are many other "CMake" pages on the Amber wiki that contain a
> lot of helpful information, especially when problems arise.)
>
> Here's my short list:
>
> 1. The "configure2" script is 4300 lines of shell script, written over
> 20 years, with outdated and inconsistent features. Fortran dependency
> checking relies on a set of perl scripts that should be (but often are
> not) updated whenever files are added or subtracted. I wrote much of
> this stuff, so no one should think it is either bulletproof or elegant.
>
> 2. Using cmake gets us help from outsiders, especially Jamie Smith,
> Jaime Rodriguez-Guerro and Simon Bray, who have done wonders in getting
> AmberTools accepted into a wider community. Because we now have a
> well-supported conda package, AmberTools is often getting used by
> people who don't even know what it is, since it is a part of other
> packages. This would not have happened if we didn't make efforts
> to follow standards that the wider community is willing to work with
> (for better or worse.) FWIW, AmberTools at conda-forge has seen
> about 200,000 downloads, and is being used by a number of
> influential projects.
>
> 3. When we need to provide a workaround, it is *far* simpler to ask users
> to add something like '-DDISABLE_TOOLS="mdgx" or
> -DFORCE_INTERNAL_LIBS="boost" to their cmake invocations, than it
> is to try to provide a modified configure script, or to ask users to
> edit a Makefile somewhere in the tree.
>
>> we rushed it [cmake] to production
> I don't agree here. CMake was introduced to developers in March of 2017,
> and recommended to users as the default three years later, in 2020. It has
> been used regularly for CI testing for two years, and by thousands of users
> for a full year.
>
> If you find a problem with CMake, please create an issue at gitlab. If it is
> a problem with code that will be AmberTools21, this is a particularly good
> time to do this, since we'd like to get as many things fixed as we can
> before the release.
>
> ...thx...dac
>
>
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--
Dr. Adrian E. Roitberg
V.T. and Louise Jackson Professor in Chemistry
Department of Chemistry
University of Florida
roitberg.ufl.edu
352-392-6972
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Received on Mon Apr 05 2021 - 07:30:02 PDT
