[CMake] What's the best way to support additional compilers for an "official" CMake language such as Fortran (fwd)

[Alan W. Irwin]

I am still interested in an answer from the CMake developers on this issue.
If CMake currently does not provide a convenient way for independent
software projects like PLplot to try out additional compiler support for
languages that are officially supported by CMake, then I will post a
wish-list bug concerning this issue.  But I would prefer some on-list
discussion of the issue first to make sure I am not missing anything.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:58:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
To: cmake at cmake.org
Subject: [CMake] What's the best way to support additional compilers for an
     "official" CMake language such as Fortran

The PLplot project has been supporting some additional Fortran compilers via
files in cmake/modules/Platform in our source tree where we use

set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/modules)

This CMake_MODULE_PATH approach requires that we put a slightly modified
version of CMakeFortranInformation.cmake in cmake/modules that searches
${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH}/Platform locations as well as
${CMAKE_ROOT}/Modules/Platform.  That's pretty clumsy but this procedure has
worked fine for CMake-2.6.x.

However, I am having trouble with the cmake-2.8.0 case. (I am getting
strange errors that use g++ rather than gfortran as the Fortran linker for
the static Fortran library case).  My guess is I need to add additional
Fortran support files in cmake/modules for the CMake-2.8.0 case.  But that
is clumsier still and requires that we immediately drop CMake-2.6.x support.
Thus, I am wondering if there is a better procedure (or whether such a
procedure could be implemented within CMake) to allow convenient CMake
support for a project like PLplot to support additional Fortran compilers
(or any additional compilers for a CMake-supported language like Fortran)
without requiring our users patch their installed version of CMake.

Of course, the long-term solution to this problem is to contribute our files
that support additional Fortran compilers to CMake.  We would be happy to do
that, but that probably involves considerable delay until they are accepted
into an official CMake release, and in any case if our users find additional
Fortran compilers (or C compilers or C++ compilers) they would like us to
support, we would always need to independently test these files over at
least one PLplot release cycle ourselves before contributing them to CMake.

So I would appreciate an answer to the above question about the best
procedure for supporting additional compilers (for Fortran or any other
officially supported language for CMake) within a project like PLplot.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________
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