[CMake] CMakeModules repository at GitHub?

[David Cole]

I, too, live in the real world, in addition to having my theories about 
it... :-)

And, for what it's worth, I'd rather add a project config file to any 
project out there that would accept code contributions from me than add 
yet another find module into CMake.

Obviously, there will be cases where that is simply not possible for 
one reason or another. But it's still the preferred mechanism for 
hooking into CMake's find_package when it is possible.

And when you have to resort to a find module, it should definitely live 
in CMake if it's generally useful for more than just your own use...


David C.


-----Original Message-----
From: Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
To: Miller Henry <MillerHenry at JohnDeere.com>
Cc: David Cole <dlrdave at aol.com>; mateusz <mateusz at loskot.net>; cmake 
<cmake at cmake.org>
Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 5:10 pm
Subject: Re: [CMake] CMakeModules repository at GitHub?


On 2013-03-28 16:41-0000 Miller Henry wrote:

> [...] I have to deal with the real world where many projects don't
provide a project config .cmake script. They see no reason to: they
don't build with cmake, other downstreams don't build with cmake.  It
seems to them that they are supporting one system, and there are
hundreds. I do not see this changing anytime soon.

You make a good point to remind us that not all projects are built
with CMake.  However, I take a middle position between you and David.
My point is many projects _do_ build with CMake, and for those this
idea (to always provide a project config .cmake script) makes sense
since it will substantially reduce the number of projects where Find
modules have to be written and just generally helps support the
expansion of the CMake ecosystem. That's a good thing from the
perspective of many on this list; the more projects that use CMake the
more valuable our CMake expertise becomes.  In other words, there is a
strong network effect here, and systematically implementing that idea
for CMake-based build system helps that along.

Therefore, I am going to implement this simple idea for the half-dozen
or so software projects where I am the CMake-based build system
maintainer, and I encourage others here to do the same.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and 
Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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