Is CMake really lacking documentation?

[anordal]

It's easy to find at least some documentation online. So without being more specific about what's missing, the "missing documentation" accusation is not credible.

[ghost]

https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.11/manual/cmake.1.html

The documentation seems pretty ok to me. It seems that this repo is just collection of FUD from other people that the @qznc didn't bother to verify.

[qznc]

I don't use cmake, so I don't know if the documentation is ok. I don't want to judge it by its looks.

We can use this issue to duke it out... 😄

[ghost]

@qznc You can't duke it out if you can't even make jabs.

[anordal]

Let's compare it with Meson. Compare, because this is subjective and everything is relative, and with Meson, because it's hyped and reputedly has good documentation – this isn't supposed to be entirely unbiased, is it?

It's easy to see that the claim has some merit:

• Do not use Meson: Some comments (rightfully) note that Meson has generally a better documentation ← Maybe the most honest
• Autotools vs CMake: CMake documentation can be a bit hard to read ← …compared to Autotools!
• Autotools vs CMake: [Meson] documentation is 10 times better that what you can find in cmake.
• Idio[ma]tic Cmake : I have never solved anything by reading CMake docs ← From the trenches. Good read.

QED. We just need to link to some of this to show that CMake is being criticized. I guess we don't claim to present the majority view, but that doesn't look problematic either in this case.

[ghost]

@anordal Even if the documentation was deemed to be of lesser quality than some other projects that doesn't mean it's missing. It being of lesser quality actually proves that it isn't missing.

[Strubbl]

That's very nit-picking. If there is bad documentation, there is still (good) documentation missing.

@TsuTsuKaKushi Have you used cmake already?