[CMake] Source file symlinks on out-of-source builds

[David Cole]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com>wrote:

> Rodolfo Lima wrote:
>
>> John Drescher escreveu:
>>
>>> install screen
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the tip but that's not my point in this whole thread (i.e.
>> I'm not looking for solutions, I'm giving one).
>>
>> CMake does so much complicate things to make working with software
>> projects a seamless experience across different platforms that I doubt
>> that automatically managing a symlink tree is such a huge effort.
>>
>> You know, there's workarounds for everything. Before cmake I wrote a gcc
>> wrapper to make its output look like what cmake does to it. If this
>> wasn't implemented in cmake and I come up with this idea, people would
>> say "but you can write a wrap to gcc to filter its output, why bother?".
>>
>> That's how I see some suggestions in this thread. IMHO cmake came to be
>> when people were sick of workarounds (like autotools) to manage
>> projects. So why resort to workarounds like we used to do when better,
>> seamless solutions exist? (I'm talking in the point of view of someone
>> that doesn't use IDE's).
>>
>>  I just think we already have a solution for out of source builds.  The
> symlink approach is yet another way to do the get the same thing done. There
> are tools out there that create sym-link trees (I can not remember the name,
> but I saw it once...)   Basically, I think this is a can of worms that we
> can do without as it does not really add that much.  I also think you
> underestimate the complexity and support of this feature.
>

I agree with Bill -- it's a can of worms. Anybody who has a significantly
large source tree will just jump up and down and scream and yell for a way
to turn this 'symlink feature' off if somebody did implement it in CMake.
Nobody wants CMake to be any slower than necessary, and implementing a
feature like this would certainly slow it down...

David
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