[CMake] Automatic out of source build's possible?

[Martin O'Brien]

I understand, but that's still a custom version for my purposes, at least
for the time being.

I definitely can't rely on the people who are complaining about having to do
the -D... to have the correct version installed, or even to recognize when
they don't, probably, and if I give them this option, they're going to write
scripts that depend on it.  The basic problem is that although the users in
question think of themselves as developers, they're really not.  They're
more IT'ish, involved in doing things like configuring continuous
integration servers, and I already get calls over things like
CMAKE_MINIMUM_REQUIRED() that they really ought to be able to figure out on
their own. 

That being said, how would I go about this?  If some sort of patch were
accepted, in time, I might be able to do this, once everybody upgraded.


mm




-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Noulard [mailto:eric.noulard at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2011 4:39 AM
To: Martin O'Brien
Cc: cmake at cmake.org
Subject: Re: [CMake] Automatic out of source build's possible?

2011/2/8 Martin O'Brien <martin.matthew.obrien at gmail.com>:
> I've resisted the urge to patch, since I really don't want to be dependent
> on a custom version of CMake.

My idea was more like proposing a feature request + patch in order to make
the feature go in upstream CMake.

I cannot ensure it will but...

> As far as how many people would like it, I don't know, but my guess would
be
> that most who were more familiar with configure or really anything that
> Getopt long-ish than CMake would probably find it more familiar.

this may be discussed by people listening to the list :-]

My opinion is that it's sometimes annoying to have several ways to do
something  (-D OPT=ON vs --enable-opt) but it can ease the transition
and/or some common place way to handle option on the command line.

> What I've done in the past in a few cases where people complained mightily
> (as well as pretty unreasonably, as this is hardly end of the world) was:
>
> -DCONFIGOPTS="--enable-<whatever> --verbose --debug..."
>
> AND/OR
>
> -DCONFIGOPTSFILE=<somefile which contained options, one per line>
>
> And then parse that/those (using a cmake module).  Very ugly, but they
could
> usually handle that with much less complaining, and it also prevented
> potential conflicts with cmake '--' options.

I see.

-- 
Erk
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