[CMake] Somehow making life easier with wxWidgets ...

[Miguel A. Figueroa-Villanueva]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Jorgen Bodde wrote:
>  After a (long) while I wanted to attend to my wxWidgets projects again
>  which I generate from a CMake project. I generated, and found out the
>  libs that were expected were still of the 2.6 version of wxWidgets,
>  while they are at 2.8 already (soon 2.9 even).

Current CVS/HEAD FindwxWidgets and I think the last release CMake
2.4.8 supports upto wxWidgets 2.9.

>  When it comes to using wxWidgets on Windows the find scripts are
>  always outdated or restrictive. Now that I am more into scripting
>  laguages I wonder is it possible to do the following with Cmake
>
>  - Call an external "find app" e.g. called find-wxWidgets.exe
>  - Retrieve the current version (2.6, 2.7, 2.8), DLL etc in CMAKE variables
>  - Configure the project with Cmake like normal
>
>  Currently the FindWx / useWx scripts continously lag behind
>  development, or are not flexible enough. Any thoughts?

I designed the module to be as flexible as I could think of in the
sense that as soon as a new version comes out, I only need to change
the script in a minimal number of places. I also have been quick about
updates. That is, as soon as I find out or someone reports it I update
the script. The problem is that the general public doesn't work with a
cvs cmake build, so they get these updates much later than they are
published. I guess we could have a guessing game and support the next
generation most probably used names... but that usually doesn't work
in general due to new modules and such.

The external find app approach that you suggest is not a good idea
IMHO, because you would have the same problem. People would still need
to update that external module frequently.

I believe that the best approach is something that we can convince the
wxWidgets developers to integrate with there distribution. In the line
of wx-config. Better yet would be to create a set of CMakeLists.txt
files for the wxWidgets system. If you build wxWidgets with CMake,
then we'd only need to find the wx-config.cmake or
wxWidgetsConfig.cmake file published by the CMakeLists.txt that
contain all settings for a build. However, that I believe was tried
before by some of the CMake developers and the wxWidgets developers
weren't very receptive to the idea, it seems.

--Miguel