[cmake-developers] [CMake 0014861]: cmake consumes command-line arguments it does not understand without a WARNING message

[Mantis Bug Tracker]

The following issue has been SUBMITTED. 
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http://public.kitware.com/Bug/view.php?id=14861 
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Reported By:                irwin
Assigned To:                
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Project:                    CMake
Issue ID:                   14861
Category:                   CMake
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     new
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Date Submitted:             2014-04-03 12:12 EDT
Last Modified:              2014-04-03 12:12 EDT
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Summary:                    cmake consumes command-line arguments it does not
understand without a WARNING message
Description: 
The commands

cmake -whatever ..

or

cmake whatever ..

currently work fine with no warning messages at all about the "-whatever" and
"whatever" arguments that it ignores.  I believe I ran into this issue years ago
so it is probably a long-standing bug that has long been tolerated, but from
recent rather bizarre experience as a result of this bug that I just learned
about, I think this bug should be addressed.

What happened is one of our knowlegeable PLplot users could not get the cmake
command-line to work properly on a Windows platform.  After a lot of
head-scratching and nobody getting anywhere with this, it turned out he was
taking notes using Microsoft Word, and cut and pasted from that to the
command-line.  Unfortunately, Microsoft word had quietly inserted a non-ascii
hyphen in that command-line so all the -D options did not have the correct
hyphen and were quietly ignored because of this CMake bug!  Instead, cmake
should have given loud warnings that it could not understand parts of his
command line.

Steps to Reproduce: 
Create a CMakeLists.txt file consisting of the following two lines:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.12.2 FATAL_ERROR)
project(test_cmake NONE)

Then create an empty build subdirectory, cd to it, and try either
one of the above cmake commands (or try specifying some -D options
with non-ascii hyphens).  The (bad) result is there are no warning messages
about the parts of the command line that cmake could not understand.
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Issue History 
Date Modified    Username       Field                    Change               
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2014-04-03 12:12 irwin          New Issue                                    
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