[CMake] Suggestion for CMake platform/compiler detection

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Tanguy Krotoff wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>> If you macrotize all the CMake code out of existence, then people
>> have to dig through your code and documentation to understand what's
>> going on.  If people need help with what's going on, they have to ask
>> you, because nobody else in the CMake community knows what's going
>> on.  This makes you a single point of failure for other people's
>> projects; many people won't use stuff if there's only 1 guy who
>> "supports" it.
>
> And? of course I know that.

Not knowing you, I wouldn't assume it.  Many a developer does not take 
other people's support burdens seriously.

>
> I didn't do it for fun, I've created all these macros because I need a
> build system as simple as possible with high level functionnalities and
> I think it can help people to switch to CMake if parts of it was 
> integrated
>
> Why do I need something like this?
>
> OpenWengo integrates FFmpeg, cURL, OpenSSL, LibGaim, GLib, Boost,
> PortAudio, Qt4, TinyXML, oSIP, oRTP, eXosip + all the OS specific libs:
> DirectX, V4L, XVideo, ALSA, OSS, QuickTime... + in some extend
> IAXClient, Java libs, Objective-C, XUL/XPCOM...
> + of course we have a lot of internal libraries
> In the future we will integrate even more stuff: VNC, libjingle, GTK+...
> And everything should compile and work under Windows (MSVC), Linux (GCC)
> and MacOSX (GCC)
> We have more than 100 CMakeLists.txt and for now we have 2 build system:
> CMake + SCons (an extended version by us). In the past we were using
> QMake aswell.
> A clean checkout from the trunk is more than 200MB and something like 
> 10 people fulltime are working on it...
>
>
> This is an improvement over CMake so don't you think there might be some
> nice ideas and improvements that can be added to CMake?
>

Sure.  But OpenWengo isn't a patch.  I'm sure everyone will be very 
happy if you submit *small* patches, bug reports, and feature requests 
in the bug tracker for *CMake*.  Nobody wants the entireity of CMake to 
be rewritten in a higher level style.  They want incremental 
improvements of general value to the CMake community.

There are ways to get this done, and things do get done.  The best plan 
is to submit individual bugs / feature requests / improvements to the 
bug tracker.  I see that you submitted bug #4060 regarding "Spaces 
removed with install target."  That's cool; I do not, however, see any 
entries regarding "suggestions for CMake platform/compiler detection," 
or anything else you have in mind.

Bear in mind, sometimes feature requests are rejected.  I've wanted a 
number of things out of CMake, and my batting average is 80% for getting 
them actually addressed.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every