Re:Xz Backdoor and Autotools Insanity
by Rochus on Saturday April 06, 2024 @06:46PM
(#39956355)
CMake - as autotools - is a meta build system; it e.g. generates make files, which are essentially scripts. Also CMake itself is essentially a VM with a scripting language. Both CMake and Make are Turing complete (and dynamically typed, as mentioned). And yes, not all build systems are the same; e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY has a statically typed specification language and intentionally avoids a Turing complete language.
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The Makefiles CMake generates are not distributed in the tarball. So no, we are not talking about apples to apples.
The OP was talking about complexity:
> These tools are generally much too complex. I don't think that e.g. CMake builds are easier to understand and analyze
From my experience (as a non programmer) CMake is much hearder to debug than autotools.