[CMake-Promote] a ./configure shell script stub

[Brandon J. Van Every]

William A. Hoffman wrote:
> At 07:43 PM 5/28/2006, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
>
>   
>>> That is where it gets hard, because cmake has to be
>>> run before you can figure out what the options are.   That is why I suggested creating
>>> an options file.  It is not perfect because it could get out of date with the true
>>> options for the project.   But, it would give people a way to document a project and
>>> have a better command line.
>>>
>>> cmake --help ../path/to/source
>>> This would read CMakeCommandLineOptions.cmake, and print out the options found in the
>>> file.
>>>  
>>>       
>> What is the motive for making it separate from CMakeLists.txt?
>>     
> Because you have to parse the entire CMakeLists.txt tree, create a CMakeCache
> before you could implement --help.  

Why can't you just have a command line options section in CMakeLists.txt 
that gets a "privileged" parse?  The parser would just look for that 
section before looking for anything else.  I am assuming that the 
CMakeLists.txt author is going to specify command line options, and 
would rather write everything inside of CMakeLists.txt, rather than 
write 2 files.  But perhaps your intent is that 
CMakeCommandLineOptions.cmake is generated, which would make it a moot 
point.

I think if you made the command line options static or "constantized," a 
lot of these issues go away.  Most of the problems seem to arise from a 
perceived need to allow all kinds of dynamic flexibility in how command 
line options are generated.  If you make 'em just spell 'em out 
statically, exactly as they're gonna be, then things should work fine.  
Just don't allow dynamically generated command line options.

> And, even then, there is currently no way
> to map a cmake variable like CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to some command line option
> like --prefix.
>
>   
CMake parses command line options already... what is difficult about 
adding more of them?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every


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