[CMake] ExternalProject() Question

[Michael Wild]

On 16. Dec, 2009, at 20:35 , Michael Jackson wrote:

> I am intrigued by the "ExternalProject" feature of CMake 2.8. One question that I have after reading through the Oct 09 "Kitware Source" is this. If I do a "make clean" or "rebuild" are all the "ExternalProjects" also cleaned/rebuilt? I could make an argument both ways but I was curious what the default was?
> 
>  One of my projects depends on HDF5, Tiff, Expat and Boost (And Qt Eventually). Writing directions to get everything downloaded and built is getting to be a pain. Would be simpler to have all that done for the user.
> 
> Thanks for any comments
> _________________________________________________________
> Mike Jackson                  mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
> BlueQuartz Software                    www.bluequartz.net
> Principal Software Engineer                  Dayton, Ohio
> 

"make clean" behaves a bit strange for me... It seems to remove some of the stamp files, but does not actually perform a "clean" on the external project, or wipe the extracted sources. For me, this is a bit of a problem, since the PATCH_COMMAND will try to re-apply a patch, which of course will fail. Not sure how to teach CMake to not re-patch a source tree... Perhaps wrap the whole thing in a apply_patch.cmake script which creates its own stamp in the external source tree and only applies the patch if that stamp does not exist...


Michael