[CMake] Debug logging of items

[Cornelis Bockemühl]

Right now I am fighting my way through large amounts of CMake code (actually working on a ParaView custom application with many own plugins, views, domains, property widgets etc. etc.), and it is sometimes really not easy not to lose track completely! Sometimes I am happy to be back into complex C++ programming - because I see much more logic in the entire thing. And it is of course no news that CMake code is not famous for being easy to debug.

Anyway, I am dreaming of some "simple" features that would sometimes help a lot, and it is all about "dumping" some kind of data. Actually this is for me often also the favorite way to debug C++ code: just print out the values of variables, arrays, etc. - e.g. if setting a breakpoint in the debugger is difficult because you are interested only in the 928773th occurrence of a certain piece of code (without even knowing that number...).

Accordingly in CMake code I am working a lot with the message() function - but within that code the problem is often that you do not even know which variables would be available at all!

Thus functions like would be really great to have:

    “give me a list of all currently known targets”
    “give me a list of all properties of a target”
    “give me a list of all currently defined variables”
    etc.

What I do not know is: Are this things that already exist - in which case I would be happy if somebody could tell me how to find them! -, or are these functions rather "feature requests"?

In fact I can hardly believe that I am the first with such kind of dreams, so my hope is still that they already exist somewhere...

--
Cornelis Bockemühl
mail: cornelis at bockemuehl.ch
phone: +41 79 644 9943
Basel, Switzerland
https://cobo.bockemuehl.ch

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