[cmake-developers] Learning from the source

[Kevin Ingwersen]

Hello everyone! This is my first post here, so hopefuly you can understand me - because I am not a native english speaker! :)

As the title suggests, I wish to learn one thing or another. Currently, I am working on a project that has a good bunch of dependencies. They all originate from different build systems - Autotools, GYP, CMake - and are therefore pretty individual. So I have searched for a build system that works cross-platform and has a nice syntax that makes things look clean. Turns out I found one, forked it, and customized it.

But now I am stuck at the configuration part. The program can very nicely track dependencies and build properly. However, it has only partial integration for configuring (generating config.h’s for example) - and that is what I wish to implement. Since CMake supports things as checking for includes, libraries, and functions, i wanted to ask how CMake is doing this.

The reason why I ended up asking here is plain simple:
- GYP has no configuration part at all.
- Autotools looks to me like I am reading some raw certificate… AKA. I just can’t wrap my head around it.

Here are some references, if you need them.
- The fork of the build system in question: https://github.com/IngwiePhoenix/build
- The project in question: https://github.com/Deskshell-Core/PhoenixEngine

Hopefully I am right here to learn more about the rather complex task of probing a system for things! ^-^

Kind regards, Ingwie.