[CMake] FindModules.cmake quality + Kitware proposition

Tue May 19 10:22:55 EDT 2015

I'll add to it that all the Find Modules should be able to support projects that have their own builds of a library. Some Find Modules (e.g FindBoost) works generally well and supports HINTS and PATHS; but other (FindCURL) do not. For me, this means that I'll have to be adding variations of numerous modules to get it done so everything links and works correctly when I'd rather just use what CMake already provides.
$0.02
Ben

     On Thursday, May 14, 2015 11:16 AM, Nagy-Egri Máté Ferenc via CMake <cmake at cmake.org> wrote:

This is more of a remark, or something to get the ball rolling, rather than anything else.
I recently came across various FindModule.cmake files (FindOpenCL, FindOpenGL, FindGLEW, FindGLM, FindSFML) as a sideeffect of a project I am developing, but have had my share with quite a few others (FindQt, RustCMake, FindOpenAL, FindBoost, …). My overall impression is that the quality of these modules is highly fluctuating to say the least. While generally the FindModules shipping with CMake as built-in scripts are usable, there is a fair amount of room for improvement.
FindGLEW.cmake for eg. is terrible. I have never imagined that such a widely used library has a 7 line FindModule script. On Windows it is practically useless.
As for nearly all other FindModule scripts, nearly none of them use target_include_libraries() that would allow for end-users of the scripts to not have to worry about include directories.
Some projects strive at being cross-platform, but compiling them on Windows (mostly the GNU projects that aim on being Windows friendly) is massive pain. libJPEG to name just one provides nmake makefiles that are capable of producing Visual Studio 2010 project files at best (huuraay), and have undocumented external dependencies. These projects (and their users) cry out for CMake support.
Here is a proposition to consider:
Kitware generally has the philosphy with CMake being: do it yourself or hire us to do it. While on a corporate basis this is a legitimate approach, I as a poor academic fellow do not have 10.000$ to spare for a feature I so wish, neither do I have the time to educate myself in the internal ways of CMake to contribute. So all I do is hack, hack, hack all day.
The Chocolatey project (a package manager for Windows) recently won a massive Kickstarter campaign that aimed solely increasing the overall quality of the project. With this campaign they aimed on growing from an ‘interesting idea’ to begin ‘mainstream’. With the money they won, they hired full time package moderators, developed automated scripts of facilitating authoring, wrote tutorials, created templates, and even managed to get the ball rolling with OneGet (Powershell 5.0 package manager manager) to adopt Chocolatey as the first supported public repo.
I would suggest Kitware start a similar community funded project to increase the overall quality of the software. While I do not have 10 grands to buy a feature, I do have 10 dollars pocket money to contribute (as do MANY others).
As several levels of goals, the stock FindModules scripts could be brought to a homogenous quality, identical naming conventions (no more MYLIB_INC_DIR, MYLIB_INCLUDE_DIRS, MyLib_INCLUDE_DIR), high quality templates for new adopters, make the CMake Guide freely available online (epub, pdf, docx, whatever), convert 10 GNU projects to CMake, convert 50 GNU projects to CMake, create Snappy back-end of CPack, or my personal favorite (the feature I do not have 10.000 dollars for) is NMake batch mode support for multicore build, etc.
There are so many places CMake itself can be improved, and so many users who really should be adopting, but have not started due to lacking man power. (These are the projects that would benefit the most from a freely available tutorial, because truth be told: writing capable, high-quality CMake scripts is no easy task.)
If I were a charmismatic spokesperson I’d say: I RAISE 10 DOLLARS, WHO’S WITH ME?! But because I’m not, I’ll just leave it here as a suggestion.
Ideas?

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