[cmake-developers] Keeping unit tests useful and splitting feature support from platform support

[Stephen Kelly]

Rolf Eike Beer wrote:

> Stephen Kelly wrote:
> 
>> What I'd like to see is a distinction of feature support from platform
>> support. In my case, I care about writing some features in cmake, but I
>> don't care about watcom, GCC 3.3.1 etc. What I'd like to do is make sure
>> my feature works on some 'reference platforms', which could be anything
>> 'non- ancient', and fixing it on the ancient ones would become
>> not-my-problem.
> 
> I find this all natural (but it's not my decision). 

I'm not sure what this statement means.

> On the other hand we
> have some other features (like e.g. the source_group stuff) that depend on
> generators and compilers.
> 
> One thing that I would only call "fallout" of such a thing, but that I
> would love to see is a way to get the compiler version for the currently
> active (C, C++, Fortran, ASM) compilers. That would probably help with
> your use case, too, when you can determine the version and show a sensible
> error message if the compiler version is too old.
> 
> Eike

Yes, while a way to get the cross-compiler compiler version would be a step 
in the right direction, it might not help in the case of features written in 
C++, as you have no opportunity to run platform checks to enable features at 
all.

Steve.