[CMake] External Packages?

[Steven Stallion]

All,

I'm currently working on a fairly large project that requires a number of
external tools be installed. I've been playing with the idea of having
CMake download and install these packages prior to building the project. I
have something that works using a combination of custom modules and
external projects, but I'm not quite satisfied.

After trolling through the find_package documentation, I'm tempted to write
a module that will download and install a CPack package hosted on an HTTP
server. This is somewhat similar to the approach that neovim has taken,
however I'd like to use the user package registry rather than
CMAKE_CURRENT_BUILD_DIR; having some persistence would make life a bit
better with multiple clones.

I'm surprised that CMake doesn't have support for something like this
already - does this ring a bell to anyone? If not, I'm tempted to put
together an ExternalPackage module that would encapsulate this behavior,
which should dovetail nicely with find_package and friends.

Thoughts?

Steve
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