[gentoo-dev] Re: cmake + ninja vs autotools

[Martin Vaeth]

William L. Thomson Jr. <wlt-ml@××××××.com> wrote:
>
> case ${CMAKE_MAKEFILE_GENERATOR} in
>         emake)
>                 DEPEND="sys-devel/make"
>                 ;;
>         ninja)
>                 DEPEND="dev-util/ninja"
>                 ;;

This is broken: Static metadata like DEPEND must not depend
on dynamic data like environment variables which are supposed
to change at emerge time.

> Only 2 thus far does not sound like most things would have issues.

In fact, almost nothing has issues. I am using
CMAKE_MAKEFILE_GENERATOR=ninja in my make.conf
since years, and the total list of packages which had
ever failed here (out of currently ~1500 installed)
is this:

dev-util/cmake
kde-apps/kate
kde-apps/gwenview
media-libs/avidemux-core
media-libs/avidemux-plugins
media-video/avidemux
media-video/kaffeine
media-video/kmplayer
net-vpn/kvpnc
sci-mathematics/reduce

This list might appear long, but note that

1. */avidemux* is essentially only 1 package
2. net-vpn/kvpnc is ancient and masked
3. sci-mathematics/reduce is ancient and masked

and moreover, perhaps some other entries of this list are even
obsolete (I do not have installed KDE 5, so I cannot try quickly;
when I had added the packages to the list, KDE 4 was rather new...)

> Ninja is most of the speed of meson less configure time savings

++
For eix, the main motivation to support meson as an
alternative build system was to be able to use ninja...