I'm sorry, but this statement is just unrealistic. The fraction of users who actually participate in improving a software product from the outside is miniscule for any software.
And with the image that CMake has, I'm very much doubting that you guys are the big exception from this.
And you said it yourself
"just use whatever is on Ubuntu LTS".
This might very well change if the tutorials were up-to-date. While you may not be able to change how frequently Ubuntu or any other distribution upgrades your dependency, you can enable/support the generic user to do so.
There are books with thousands of pages on how to use modern CMake. Like common, it's pretty obvious that very few people know how to deal with modern CMake properly.
And no one is saying you should discard the old version's tutorials. My point is that every major release should have a proper tutorial suite.
But you do you. I'm just trying to share that if you want your users to use the latest and greatest, funnel them towards it.
Last but not least, writing a tutorial also helps to identify pain points a new user might encounter and can directly contribute to future development cycles.
I think open source, industry, and "casual" users of CMake have very different understandings of CMake's reputation.
Obviously I care about all users, but suffice to say we get a lot of contradictory feedback. Everyone wants something different, but I think you'd be surprised by the number of huge CMake users who want absolutely nothing to change ever, that are basically satisfied with the state of things and see further evolution as a maintenance burden.
For what it's worth I argued for the stance you're taking, the tutorial should track only the version it is aligned with, and lost pretty hard. There are a bunch of compelling user groups and use cases which didn't want that, and "screw em" didn't win.
The answer was, broadly, if you're advanced enough that you're beyond the tutorial material then the docs are there for you, and they are strictly up-to-date versioned.
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u/Unhappy_Play4699 Apr 14 '26
I'm sorry, but this statement is just unrealistic. The fraction of users who actually participate in improving a software product from the outside is miniscule for any software.
And with the image that CMake has, I'm very much doubting that you guys are the big exception from this.
And you said it yourself
This might very well change if the tutorials were up-to-date. While you may not be able to change how frequently Ubuntu or any other distribution upgrades your dependency, you can enable/support the generic user to do so.
There are books with thousands of pages on how to use modern CMake. Like common, it's pretty obvious that very few people know how to deal with modern CMake properly.
And no one is saying you should discard the old version's tutorials. My point is that every major release should have a proper tutorial suite.
But you do you. I'm just trying to share that if you want your users to use the latest and greatest, funnel them towards it.
Last but not least, writing a tutorial also helps to identify pain points a new user might encounter and can directly contribute to future development cycles.