[CMake] What about...

[William A. Hoffman]

At 11:05 AM 5/26/2006, Thomas Zander wrote:
>On Friday 26 May 2006 16:24, you wrote:
>> I am not sure I understand what you want to type to do the build?
>
>williamMake would do; of wmake if you want. :)
>Bottom line; I don't care what the name is as long as it _can_ be made 
>more usable. Which is impossible with make.

OK, so what you want is a cmake front end to the build process.
CMake is not a build tool, it just generates build files for various build
tools, and make happens to be one of them.   However, it would be possible to add
a layer to cmake that actually does the build.  Currently we do run build
processes from ctest, so we have the code to do that.   I have thought
it might not be a bad addition to cmake.   I mistakenly thought you wanted
to know how to get things done with 2.4.2, and I was trying to help you.
However, this is really a feature request.

You want a new tool (say cmakebuld) that works something like this:

cmakebuild help           // list all the targets
cmakebuild install        // run the install target
cmakebuild build          // build all targets
cmakebuild build -verbose // build all with VERBOSE set to true
cmakebuild build target   // build a target

That is all not very hard to do, and would work with all of the generators,
even the IDE generators.

However, this request:
>cmake --compile-jobs=n
>similar to -j but only for compile jobs, so it will not make multiple 
>link/etc jobs be run at the same time.

is much harder.  Since cmake is not a build tool, it never builds a file,
it only generates the build files for other tools, we are limited to the
capabilities of the tools we are using.  Some of the generators do not support
parallel builds.   gmake does with -j, and we are looking into making it not
link multiple things at the same time, and do have some ideas on how to do that.
So, cmakebuild -jobs N could be made to work if you were using gmake.

So, it would be possible to create cmakebuild.  The question is how useful
would it be.   People that are used to the standard configure; make projects
most likely are somewhat comfortable with the command line of make.  People
that do not like the command line of make, can currently use Kdevelop, Xcode
or MS Visual studio generators for CMake.   The advantage of creating a tool
like this, would be that you could create a single set of docs that would work
on any platform, with any build tool.  

>A 'configure' script generator that will just convert between the (good 
>old) configure and the cmake foo.  Makes it actually possible to discover 
>what features there are without consulting online documentation ;)
I am not sure about what you want here.  
Do you want something that will convert a configure script into cmake files?
Do you want to convert cmake files into a configure script?  What is the goal with
this question?

-Bill