A failure to interoperate; or; the power struggle between tools.

I have spent the morning cursing and swearing as I try to get CMake and Eclipse to play nicely with one another.

This is a frustration that I feel again and again. So many tools try to take control; to impose their own view of how things "should be" in the world - and those views often conflict.

Both CMake and I agree that out-of-source builds are the only sane thing to do. Why take the risk of having the build process screw up the source tree in some subtle way? This also means that we can have easily create multiple builds from the same source - and not just limited to Debug & Release builds, either. We can have builds that just generate documentation, or builds that just perform static analysis & style checking, or builds for different platforms, different targets, different levels of optimisation; all completely configuration-managed and under version control, yet totally independent of the actual content of the source tree.

Yet why do so many IDEs take a totally divergent view on how the build should be organized? Why must the project file live in the root directory of the source tree? Why must I jump through hoops to build my software outside of the source tree?

Why is it that using an IDE automatically means that I have to use a brain-dead and limited concept of project organisation?

Come back make, come back gcc, come back vi. All is forgiven.

I am all for the idea that some tools should be "opinionated" - but you do need to be prepared for pain if you want to use two different "opinionated" tools together.

For that reason, we should think carefully about developing more tools that are less all-encompassing, that are more humble, more secular, and more flexible in their approach.