[cmake-developers] [CMake 0015490]: Provide a stable interface to the cmake cache for external tooling

[Mantis Bug Tracker]

The following issue has been SUBMITTED. 
====================================================================== 
http://public.kitware.com/Bug/view.php?id=15490 
====================================================================== 
Reported By:                Stephen Kelly
Assigned To:                
====================================================================== 
Project:                    CMake
Issue ID:                   15490
Category:                   (No Category)
Reproducibility:            have not tried
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     new
====================================================================== 
Date Submitted:             2015-04-01 22:25 CEST
Last Modified:              2015-04-01 22:25 CEST
====================================================================== 
Summary:                    Provide a stable interface to the cmake cache for
external tooling
Description: 

External tooling typically parses the CMakeCache.txt file directly in order to
extract essential information. The format of the file, and how to parse it are
not documented, and it does not have documented stability guarantees.

There is a need for tooling to read (and possibly write) cache values, so some
stable interface should be provided. That can either mean

1) A new format in a new file
2) Documenting the existing format.

The first option has the advantage that a common format for structured documents
can be chosen (such as json).

The second option has the advantage that external tooling does not need to wait
for a new CMake version to generate a new file, because the existing format has
not changed in a long time (and maybe can't change because of de-facto stability
requirements for existing tools).

====================================================================== 

Issue History 
Date Modified    Username       Field                    Change               
====================================================================== 
2015-04-01 22:25 Stephen Kelly  New Issue                                    
======================================================================