[CMake] Question about best practices for large Multi-stage builds

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Taranowski <tom at baringforge.com> wrote:
> Now, I'm trying to implement a multi-stage build which does the following:
> 1) builds some external third-party dependencies.
> 2) auto-generate some code
> 3) build the source
> 4) package the result
>
> To do this, I'd like to implement some top level build targets in cmake, so
> I can run make auto_generate, make third_party, etc.
>
> I can see a couple different potential ways to do this, but I've not been
> able to google up  documentation that discusses the best method for
> implementing this.  How are folks generally approaching this top level build
> target issue?

I tried to do it all in cmake for a while, but then I gave up and use a
shell script or something to drive the inner builds.  The problem was,
some developers wanted to not build everything; they wanted
precompiled versions of the other packages.  And it was just too painful
for some devs to build one way, and others to build another way.
- Dan