autocmake/doc/about.rst
2015-06-04 12:13:44 +02:00

67 lines
2.0 KiB
ReStructuredText

About Autocmake
===============
You typically want to use CMake when you get tired of manually editing
Makefiles. Autocmake is for people who are tired of editing CMake files.
Autocmake assembles CMake modules, generates ``CMakeLists.txt`` as well as
``setup.py``, which serves as a front-end to ``CMakeLists.txt``. All this is
done based on a lightweight ``autocmake.cfg`` file::
update.py --self
|
| fetches Autocmake infrastructure
v
autocmake.cfg
|
| update.py
v
CMakeLists.txt (and setup.py front-end)
|
| setup.py (which invokes CMake)
v
Makefile (or something else)
|
| make
v
Build/install/test targets
Why Autocmake
-------------
The main motivation for us to create Autocmake as a CMake framework library was
to simplify CMake code transfer between codes. We got tired of manually diffing
and copy-pasting boiler-plate CMake code and watching it diverge while
maintaining the CMake infrastructure in a growing number of scientific projects
which typically have very similar requirements:
- Fortran and/or C and/or C++ support
- Compiler flags
- Front-end script (setup.py)
- Support for parallelization: MPI, OMP, CUDA
- Math libraries (BLAS, LAPACK)
Our other motivation for Autocmake was to make it easier for developers who do
not know CMake to generate a CMake infrastructure within minutes.
Autocmake is a chance to provide well documented and tested set of CMake
plug-ins. With this we wish to give also users of codes the opportunity to
introduce the occasional tweak without the need to read CMake documentation.
Explicit is better than implicit
--------------------------------
Our design principle is to let Autocmake do one thing, as explicitly as
possible and to minimize "hidden" actions in the background.
Convention over configuration
-----------------------------
Our guideline is to follow good established conventions
to allow users and developers to recognize the configuration
when moving to a new project.