[CMake] handling global state

[Filipe Sousa]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> I need some stylistic advice on handling global state.  I'm starting to 
> break my monolithic CMakeLists.txt up into subdirectories.  I'm building 
> the Chicken compiler and I need to do staged builds.  A lot of 
> essentially the same operations, done on itself multiple times so that 
> it's compiled up to its own most current version.
> 
> I realize I can use the cache to pass global state.  However, there's 
> often global state that I don't want the user to modify.  Nor do I 
> really want to clutter the output of CMakeSetup with such extraneous 
> state.  I could mark those variables as advanced, which reduces the 
> immediately visible clutter, but I don't really want clutter in the 
> advanced variables either.  Also they can still modify them, which is 
> not what I want.  For instance I've got certain constants like the 
> minimum Chicken build number, and nothing good can come from someone 
> changing them.  I've also got a lot of -D flags from probing the system, 
> that go into ADD_DEFINITIONS.  I don't want the user to mess with 'em, 
> or run the probes multiple times.  I just want to determine them at the 
> toplevel and then pass them down to subdirectories.
> 
> I could include constants via an INCLUDE(global.cmake) file, but I'd 
> rather have them in the toplevel CMakeLists.txt.  Right at the beginning 
> of it, where a maintainer can easily see what's going on and nothing is 
> obfuscated.
> 
> So how do you pass read-only global state to subdirectory consumers?
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every

Maybe SET INTERNAL is what you are looking for.

-- 
Filipe Sousa

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