[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 2:38:25 PM UTC+12, David Froble wrote:
> Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 7:23:41 AM UTC+12, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> More than a little of what causes problems with development on OpenVMS 
>>> — where to place files, how to keep applications separated, source code 
>>> management, digitally-signing apps, etc — is handled for the developer 
>>> within Xcode and within OS X.
>> 
>> If I were you, I would not use Apple’s proprietary way of doing things as
>> a good model to follow. Look to Linux instead.
> 
> What type of structured approaches does Linux offer ???

Flexibility, rather than tying you to one IDE. Open-source projects use a bewildering variety of build systems, all the way from a simple Makefile upwards to things like GNU Autotools, SCons, Ant/Gradle and who knows what else. The reality is, there is no single best one. CMake is an interesting creature: it’s actually a meta-build system, that generates control files for build systems. Thus, the same CMake config can be used cross-platform, to drive XCode on Mac, Visual Studio on Windows, and GNU Make on Linux. This is how Blender is built, for example.

Version control seems to be steadily coalescing around Git, though. Certainly, centralized VCSes are seen as obsolete these days.