[ale] [ANNC] ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thurs., April 19th, 2012

[Aaron Ruscetta]

Our highlight presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
for 7:30pm on Thursday, April 19th, 2012 will be:

CMake
-- or --
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and
Love Automated Build Systems
with Ryan Curtin

Synopsis:
– Maybe you’ve heard of CMake before. If you haven’t, maybe you’ve
heard of autotools. And if you have worked with autotools, well, I am
sure your friends have heard your sighs of sorrow. If you have worked
with CMake, you probably have your own sighs of sorrow too.
Build systems, or “makefile generators”, as CMake calls itself, are
never pretty. But it’s better than that festering mess you call a Makefile.
I mean, come on! You don’t even know how it works anymore. Nobody
does. It’s this horrifying black box that executables magically come out
of. Oh, and it’s not portable… don’t even think about running that on
HP-UX or whatever. And if it is portable… well, I can only imagine
the nightmare _that_ Makefile must be.
– CMake provides most of a solution to your building and compilation
problems. It has a nice language which lets you define how to build
your projects, and on top of that, it’s portable, even to Windows.
Unfortunately, there is some voodoo required when dealing with CMake.
My aim in this presentation is to shed light on some of this voodoo and
give you enough knowledge to (a) start building your simple (or
advanced) projects with CMake and (b) know how to find solutions to your
more complex problems (and unfortunately with CMake, Google-fu isn’t
always enough).

Bio:
– Ryan Curtin is a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech studying machine
learning. He [denies having any] interesting biographical trivia [despite
being an extraordinarily complex biological machine which is constantly
learning through the generation of trivial biographical data ].

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We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
<http://mail.ale.org/?page_id=2>
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Per SOP, this notice is also posted at our
ALE web site: <http://ALE.org>