[CMake] Converting a large C++-Project to CMake

[Benjamin King]

Hello,

I'm working on a ~1.5Mio LOC C++ project and our buildsystem is a 
hodgepodge of handcrafted Makefiles, shell scripts and qmake projects.
I tried to convert a subset to CMake and it looks very promising so far.

One important part of our development workflow is this:
1) User 'nightly' builds versions of the project every night on several 
development servers.
2) A developer is coming to the office in the morning, and 
copies/hardlinks the nightly build to his home dir and probably patches 
uncommited changes from yesterday into the newly copied build.

Our build is taking ages (almost a three hours on the fastest of our 
servers) and it would be really painful if everybody needed to rebuild 
everything for himself in the morning.

According to the FAQ, CMake does not support copying build trees around. 
On the development servers, we have the special situation that all 
external tools needed for the build are either in /usr/bin, 
/usr/local/bin or /opt/local/ourstuff/build/bin. Would it be feasible to 
copy a build tree in such a setting? Or could we copy everything, throw 
the CmakeCache away, reconfigure and reuse the object files that already 
were build?

Do you have any advice on this or other ideas? This is really a 
make-or-break feature for us and I'd like to present some solution with 
CMake for it.

Cheers,
   Benjamin