[CMake] An observation about CTest

[Convey, Christian J CIV NUWC NWPT]

Hi guys,

First off, I'd like to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone who's helped me figure out how to use CTest in the past few weeks.  I'm very grateful to you and to those who develop CTest.

I'd like to offer one piece of constructive criticism about ctest.  If found learning how to use it to be very difficult, in part because controlling ctest involves setting a lot of variables whose purposes aren't clearly documented.  But the bigger concern I have is that it's not clear which of those variables are meant to be used by people like me, and which are meant to be treated as implementation details that may change from one release to the next of CTest.  This makes it hard for me (and perhaps others) to control ctest, because I don't want to rely on a variable or behavior that's considered "internal" and likely to change in the next release.

I guess what I'm arguing for is a clearer delineation of CTest's public interface vs. its internal implementation details, so that users like me don't accidentally cross that line.

Thanks again,
Christian

P.S. My final solution was to set the "BUILDNAME" cmake variable on a cmake command-line, and later on to just run "ctest -D NightlyStart ... -D NightlySubmit".  Works like a charm.

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