[cmake-developers] Making kwsys a proper library

[Brad King]

On 08/15/2015 12:20 AM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> What makes the kwsys code special in a way that makes creating a 
> shared library inappropriate?

We want to share the code across projects but we don't want it to
get in the way of those projects evolving or releasing.  KWSys has
no version number or API version level, and we don't want to maintain
one.  Exactly one version of KWSys is used by each version of our
consuming projects, down to the granularity of individual commits
on each side.  We want to remain free to make incompatible changes
at any time.  Dependents update their source and port to such changes
when they are ready, not when some user decides to try that particular
combination of versions.  We don't have to worry about mixing versions
in different dependents (due to prefix configuration), or about forward
or backward compatibility on either end of the dependency arrows (due
to version locking at the source level).

-Brad