[CMake] Is there really any cmake support?

[Michael Wild]

On 28. Mar, 2010, at 12:37 , Eric Noulard wrote:

> 2010/3/28 Fred Fred <stan1313 at hotmail.fr>:
>> This list seems not to be really active
> 
> You are kidding right?
> Did you check the past 3 years archive ?

Two years worth of messages in my mailbox: 16422...

> 
>> and I did not receive any help since I posted this one week ago.
>> BTW this issue has been open on Mantis more than
>> 3 months ago and seems still to be open!
> 
> I'm sure that you may find far older bugs on many project.

And this one is probably one of the harder bugs to fix, and very few people seem to be affected by it (that is, most programmers probably don't even try to use international characters in their path names...)

> 
>> So is there really anybody trying to help on cmake??
> 
> May be you want :-) ?

That's how it usually works (and quite well at that) in open source projects: Everybody scratches his own itch ;-)

> 
> I think you may be wrong about what to expect from an Open Source
> community and how to ask for help.

AFAIK Kitware does prioritize paid work, so perhaps the OP should contact the sales department ;-)

Back to the original problem:

The easy fix? Only use ASCII characters in your path names...

The real fix would be to port CMake to fully support UTF-16/32: a huge undertaking, with any software. Especially, since wchar_t is not guaranteed to be large enough to hold unicode characters; it may be as small as 8 bit! On many platforms, most compilers use 32 bit, but you can't rely on that. The upcoming C++ standard (C++0x) does define exact-width character types (char16_t, char32_t) and the corresponding string types (std::u16string and std::u32string), but then I don't know about the whole machinery you need to actually deal with such strings effectively. However, this is a future standard and I'm very sure that the CMake-developers will not rely on any of its features for years to come since they want CMake to build on all kinds of old and weird systems.

One option would be to use ICU (http://icu-project.org), but again, this would require a lot of work and is a HUGE dependency...

Michael