[cmake-developers] Support for version suffixes

[Brad King]

On 03/28/2017 04:07 AM, Jean-Michaël Celerier wrote:
> I remember asking for the same thing a few weeks ago on IRC because of
> a small behaviour change in cmake 3.8.0 rc2 that I wanted to put behind
> an if(version_less).

For reference, this was also proposed in issue 16656 [1].  The problem
is that 3.8.0-rc1 must not compare as less than 3.8.0 or the release
candidate will not satisfy `cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.8.0)`.
We want the release candidates to behave for projects as if they were
the final release in order to fully test them as such.  Users running
a release candidate should always be running the latest candidate.
Once the final release for a given version of CMake is out, none of its
corresponding release candidates should be used anymore.  Projects should
write their code under this assumption.

If a project has trouble with a specific release candidate then it can
use `if(MATCHES)` or another string-based approach to reject that
specific release candidate version, just as it might do if there were
a problem with a final release version of CMake.

-Brad


[1] https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues/16656