I want to use KDL (Kinematics and Dynamics Library) in robot control box. But robot control box uses SCons as their build system while KDL uses CMake.
It turned out that the control box doesn't have CMake installed. Should I install CMake in the control box? Or write SCons file for compiling KDL?
====================================================
My question is ambiguous. Sorry for that. And unfortunately, I cannot show the link of Control Box, it's not public. Here is link of KDL installation manual.
http://www.orocos.org/kdl/installation-manual
Let me make it more clear.
Forget all of previous question above and all about Control box, KDL. Let's say that you want to use one library. But the library can be built using CMake according to installation manual. Your PC doesn't have CMake installed but it has SCons, and unfortunately you should not install CMake on your PC.
If you can only use SCons, what can you do?
I know this situation is not usual, I want to know your opinion.
To answer your initial question: Yes, you should always try to install CMake, if that is a build requirement for you library and if you need to build that library from the sources.
To answer your later question: Replacing or rewriting the build system scripts is a major effort and not advisable. In general there is no script to convert build-systems. Such script might help to make the manual transformation. If you have a look at LLVM's effort to replace Autotools by CMake or Boost replacing it's own build system by CMake, you find out it takes several people several years and still not everybody is satisfied.
Often you don't need to build the library yourself. Either there are already built packages from the project directly of from your distribution (Debian etc. packages) or third party packagers like Mac Ports or NuGet. In your case KDL provides Debian/Ubuntu packages.
Additional KDL is part of ROS, which is experimental in Homebrew for OS X.