[CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7" to run the INSTALL target

Wed Feb 8 11:16:48 EST 2012

Ah, that makes sense.  Wonder how hard it would be to add a
Pseudo-target to CMake for the targets it will build, and allow the
scripts to set some properties on them which would be imported later as
they are created...

Aaron Meadows

From: david_bjornbak at agilent.com [mailto:david_bjornbak at agilent.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 10:14 AM
To: Meadows, Aaron C.; cmake at cmake.org
Subject: RE: [CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7"
to run the INSTALL target

I've tried similar techniques with ADD_DEPENDENCIES to ALL_BUILD and the
trouble with this,  within a single project these targets are not
generated yet and you would have to change CMake's C++ code to change
this type of behavior.

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:231 (set_target_properties):

  set_target_properties Can not find target to add properties to:
INSTALL

You might be able to export the target but, I don't believe you can
export and import INSTALL and ALL_BUILD targets in a reasonable manner.

++David->Bjornbak;

From: aaron.meadows at thomsonreuters.com
[mailto:aaron.meadows at thomsonreuters.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 7:55 AM
To: BJORNBAK,DAVID (A-Sonoma,ex1); cmake at cmake.org
Subject: RE: [CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7"
to run the INSTALL target

I wonder if you could do something like:

  set_target_properties(INSTALL PROPERTIES EXCLUDE_FROM_DEFAULT_BUILD 0
)

Aaron Meadows

From: david_bjornbak at agilent.com [mailto:david_bjornbak at agilent.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 9:44 AM
To: Meadows, Aaron C.; cmake at cmake.org
Subject: RE: [CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7"
to run the INSTALL target

What I'm asking  for is 1) or "Can you set things up so that F7 does a
full build and then automatically does the INSTALL target build?"

Developers in my team have expressed a need to hit F7 during they're day
to day work and the resulting being the INSTALL target.

This is not a general change I would adopt for our automated build
processes and I can see the need for an individual developer using
Visual Studio having this functionality e.g. hit F7 and have the INSTALL
target fire off.

A post build step appears to be the only present option for this
request.  The other alternative is to alter CMake's C++ code and change
the dependency and behavior or the generator for Visual Studio.

++David->Bjornbak;

From: aaron.meadows at thomsonreuters.com
[mailto:aaron.meadows at thomsonreuters.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 7:33 AM
To: BJORNBAK,DAVID (A-Sonoma,ex1); cmake at cmake.org
Subject: RE: [CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7"
to run the INSTALL target

I had a hard time following these questions.  It sounds like you're
asking the following:

1)     Can you set things up so that F7 does a full build and then
automatically does the INSTALL target build?

2)     Can you set things up so that you can build a sub project and
have it install just that sub project automatically?

Assuming those are your questions, I'm guessing there isn't a good way
to do that automatically.  Barring any better suggestions from more
experienced CMaketeers, I would probably look into creating a function
that adds a post build step to a project which will perform the
installation of the project.  Then doing a build all would cause each
project to individually build and install, and building a single
subproject would cause that subproject to build and install (thus
solving 1 and 2 together).  That doesn't seem ideal (certainly, I
wouldn't want my build to automatically install all the time, which is
probably why the INSTALL project is excluded by default.).  Depending on
what you are doing, you might want that auto install behavior to only be
tied to a "Release" build, or possibly introduce and "Release and
Install" that does both.

Aaron Meadows

From: cmake-bounces at cmake.org [mailto:cmake-bounces at cmake.org] On Behalf
Of david_bjornbak at agilent.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 1:48 PM
To: cmake at cmake.org
Subject: [CMake] Under Visual Studio , allow developers to hit "F7" to
run the INSTALL target

Developers on our team have found issues with the difference between
"INSTALL" and the default build or "F7" build all under Visual Studio.
My question is, there's a reasonable way to configure cmake or Visual
Studio to run the INSTALL target when you hit "F7" or use the default
"Build Solution" functionality to run INSTALL.

We're working a fairly large project and the default setting of having
INSTALL dependent on ALL or separating out the two targets makes sense
when you're building the entire project.

However, we allow developers to build sub projects and it makes sense if
these sub project just install quickly into a larger pre-built
installation directory.  The confusion currently is, they run ALL_BUILD
or "F7" and the build finishes and they forget to run "INSTALL".
Particularly we, had developers that worked formally on smaller
non-Cmake Visual Studio projects and not Linux so, they're not used to
the make all and then make install defacto standard.

This request is similar as the following on "Selecting INSTALL target in
Visual Studio Configuration by default"  but, I wanted to see if anyone
had any other suggestions on this topic.

http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2011-April/044025.html

++David->Bjornbak;

This email was sent to you by Thomson Reuters, the global news and
information company. Any views expressed in this message are those of
the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them
to be the views of Thomson Reuters.

This email was sent to you by Thomson Reuters, the global news and information company. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Thomson Reuters.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/attachments/20120208/07f3c3c6/attachment-0001.htm>