[CMake] Generating Source Files

[Bill Hoffman]

Jeremy Cowgar wrote:

> 
> I was hoping to not have to run cmake all the time. I don't want to have 
> to worry if I edit parser.e, and it ads a new .c file to build, if I am 
> compiling that new file or not. 1/2 the time I'll never know if parser.e 
> was updated in such a way.
> 
> I'm beginning to think that CMake just isn't up to the task and maybe we 
> should stick with our three makefiles :-/ With the makefiles, we have a 
> dependency on the .e files, if they change, then we launch $(MAKE) 
> generate ... Then when we go to build our project, we do $(MAKE) compile 
> ... This allows us to easily include the .mak file the generator 
> creates. the first time around it's empty, but it doesn't matter because 
> when the actual sources are compiled, make is launched, the Makefile is 
> parsed again and this time (because it's after generation) the .mak file 
> has content and everything is built automatically. All we do currently 
> is "make" and everything is handled for us. It's just getting burdensome 
> maintaining three makefiles.
> 

OK, so your current make solution runs make recursively to solve the 
problem.

To get this to work in CMake you will have to run cmake recursively.  In 
CVS CMake cmake has a --build command that can be used to drive a build. 
  In 2.6, you can use ctest --build-and-test to cmake and the build tool 
automatically.

So, you create a custom command that runs your parser and creates a full 
CMakeLists.txt file to build the output of the parser.  Then run ctest 
--build-and-test on that directory to build the parser output.   What is 
the output of the parser?  Is it a program or a library, or both?

-Bill