[CMake] cmake support Eclipse

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 31.07.07 12:12:17, Andy Dingfelder wrote:
> My vision for a cmake plugin would be as an administrative tool that
> eases the creation of the CMakeLists.txt file and the running of
> ccmake.
> 
> Basically, there would be a GUI screen or wizard that would ask
> questions such as what OS you want to target, what files to include, and
> what toolchain to use, and then you could simply tell eclipse to do a
> build and it would use cmake to build all the appropriate targets.  

There's one problem with this GUI approach: It never scales, especially
for buildsystems such as CMake. I've written a good part of KDevelop3's
QMake Manager (a GUI on top of the QMake buildsystem, which is more
limited than CMake and the advanced features are also not so well known)
and one thing I've learned is: You can provide a good GUI for beginners
who just want to add a bunch of files and get a binary/library. Even
adding includes and libraries can be made to work with a GUI (as in
lists, editlines, fileselectors). 

But for "real world" complex projects that utilize such buildsystem to
their full extent another approach seems much more promising (instead of
trying to squeeze each aspect of the language into a GUI): Treat it as a
language, that is let the user write the CMakeLists.txt files directly,
but provide help in editing them. For CMake this means syntax
highlighting, completion of macro's, suggesting possible options and so
on. 

Andreas

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