[CMake] Is the situation with CMake + Eclipse ever going to get any better?

[Talin]

I've been using CMake and Eclipse for a bunch of different projects over
the last several years. Although many aspects of both CMake and Eclipse
have improved over the years, using them together still has a lot of
problems.

>From what I understand, you have three choices when setting up a project:

1) Use in-source builds.
2) Use out-of-source builds with a single generated project.
3) Use out-of-source builds with both a build project and a source project.

Option (1) has a lot of problems, especially if you have multiple build
configurations. I won't go into the details here, but most of the CMake
tutorials I've seen recommend against this.

Option (2) means that you can't use EGit or any other version control
system integrated with Eclipse.

Option (3) means that Eclipse thinks that you have two copies of every
source file - every time you search, or open a file by name, you get two
entries for the same file. Usually what you end up with is an editor window
with lots of duplicate tabs.

Now, some people have recommended that you set the "derived" flag on the
source files in the "build" project to cause Eclipse to ignore the files in
that project, but this creates even worse problems. For one thing, the
error links in the build console output point to the build project, not the
source project. So when you get a compiler error and click on the link, it
opens the wrong version of the file.

Thus you still end up with an editor window full of duplicate tabs - and if
you select the wrong one and type a character, you get the annoying "this
is a derived file, are you sure you want to edit it?" dialog. This happens
frequently enough to be a serious annoyance - I generally end up turning
'derived' off since it's less painful.

There's a fourth option, actually, which is use a different IDE :) However,
my projects tend to be multi-language projects - i.e. they have support
libraries for C++, Python, Java, and so on. They also tend to have a lot of
custom build targets (an example would be a script that invokes the Google
protobuf generator). Unfortunately, there aren't very many decent IDEs that
can handle more than one source language or custom build targets.

-- 
-- Talin
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