[CMake] Announcing CMake BASIS, a set of CMake based project interoperability and automation tools

[Andreas Schuh]

On Jan 23, 2014, at 4:17 PM, Stephen Kelly <steveire at gmail.com> wrote:

> Andreas Schuh wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jan 23, 2014, at 1:11 PM, Andreas Schuh
>> <andreas.schuh.84 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Jan 23, 2014, at 9:40 AM, Stephen Kelly
>>> <steveire at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>>> Another example: You have code for adding scripts as executables. What
>>>>>> are the generic (non-BASIS related) use cases for that?
>>>>>> 
>>>>> You can define dependencies among them or to modules written in the
>>>>> same scripting language.
>>>> 
>>>> Can you say why this is useful?
>> 
>> Let me give just one more example, if you could define that a script
>> depends on another executable target (e.g., build from C++), when I
>> rebuild only the script, the other executable will be recompiled and
>> linked if it has changed since the last build as well. This is not
>> possible at the moment without custom build commands/targets, but often
>> (Shell) scripts are indeed calling other executables of your package. Then
>> if you just want to test the changes made to the script, you can simply
>> run “make myscript” and all dependencies will be updated as well.
> 
> This looks like something that might be worth supporting better, but I can't 
> imagine how the cmake code would look or work.

With the current CMake commands, you could actually do the following:

add_executable(myutil main.cpp)
add_custom_target(myscript SOURCES myscript.sh)
add_dependencies(myscript myutil)

My goal with BASIS was, however, to reduce the number of different commands needed as in

add_executable(myutil.cpp)
add_executable(myscript.sh)
add_dependencies(myscript myutil)

and to establish an understanding of scripts to be just another kind of executables and modules being just another kind of shared library.

> Thanks,
> 
> Steve.
> 
> 
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