[CMake] What about...

[Lloyd Hilaiel]

Yo Thomas,

We use cmake to build a large project (10 or so different SDKs).

In our case, we too wanted a cmakebuild tool, so we wrote one.
It wraps the native build tools with a higher level of commands
"build debug" "build release" "run tests" "package SDKs" etc.

Some of the commands for this build tool are very specific to our
product and our problems others are perhaps generalizable.  I had 
never thought this was something that cmake would provide, as I as a 
developer usually use native build tools directly, while the consumers
of our software use the lightweight wrapper to build our stuff.

As an interim solution you could provide a similar tool for people
consuming KDE, and perhaps while writing the tool it would crystallize
a set of features that would go into a generic "cmakebuild" tool.

I'm still curious if there's enough there in the universal appeal bucket
to make a general tool out of it, and am not familiar with what
features/code cmake (ctest) already have built in to facilitate this.

I would be willing to contrast our "cmakebuild" tool with what you
come up with to try to identify the overlap and sketch out the
commands of such a general tool as an experiment...

best,
lloyd

/-- Around  6 PM on [05/26/06] (zander at kde.org) "said" -- 
>On Friday 26 May 2006 17:55, you wrote:
>> >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?
>
>I have helped a set of people on irc to get started with koffice compiling 
>using cmake. They all had a lot of problems with the arcane variables 
>like the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and most people find that D in front a bit 
>weird a well.
>
>So; instead of letting the user (not only a developer!!) type
> cmake ../../project -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR
>there would be a command line tool (which I want to call configure, I 
>don't care if its shell script or perl or whatever) and that tool would 
>parse:
>	./configure --prefix=foo
>and execute the cmake equivalent that I typed above.
>
>Again; this is all focussed on making cmake more usable for the KDE 
>community; but I guess a lot of cmake users will benefit from it as well.
>You have to remember that there are a lot of end users downloading the 
>sources and I can't in all honesty tell them its something better if they 
>have to type the above cmake PREFIX thing instead of using the configure 
>thing we had before.
>
>Hope that explains it better :)
>-- 
>Thomas Zander



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