[cmake-developers] Generating buildsystem metadata from CMake

[Tobias Hunger]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Stephen Kelly <steveire at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Make it possible for editors/IDEs to allow specifying the configuration
>   at build-time, where the IDE has that feature, and where a multi-config
>   generator is available.  That is, QtCreator provides user-interface for
>   choosing debug/release config to build.  Currently it can't offer that
>   when using cmake, because it only allows the use of Makefile or Ninja
>   generators, in order to make use of the C::B file.  QtCreator should be
>   able to use the Xcode or Visual Studio generators, generate the metadata
>   file(s), and invoke `cmake --build . --config ${CONFIG}` as
>   appropriate.  Eclipse, Sublime and other editors have similar abilities
>   to invoke config-specific builds after generation.

We can offer debug/release even with different build directories in
Creator. Those are just labels on the build configuration that
includes the build directory and the configuration to be set up in
that build.

For the other build systems it is completely safe to just nuke any
build directory and creator will re-initialize it on the next build.
That is unfortunately not the case with cmake at this time though: If
you nuke a cmake build directory then creator will be completely lost
about how to regenerate the configuration again.