[Paraview-developers] Moving to hdf5-1.8.x

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

So what exactly is the point of externalproject_add if you can't add an external project to the build?

> You could do ExternalProject_Add to build HDF5 as long as everything that
> FindPackage currently sets gets set in a predictive fashion (*before* HDF5
> itself is downloaded, configured, built or installed...)

I've tried it on a test project and it copies my hdf, configures and builds it - but only when I explicity build the hdf target. I'm still playing with it ...

JB

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Cole [mailto:david.cole at kitware.com]
> Sent: 15 April 2010 17:50
> To: Dave Partyka
> Cc: Biddiscombe, John A.; paraview-developers at paraview.org
> Subject: Re: [Paraview-developers] Moving to hdf5-1.8.x
> 
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 7:21 AM, Dave Partyka <dave.partyka at kitware.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 	Just thinking out loud, but we could make building HDF5 an
> "external_project" call instead. This will download/update, configure, build
> and install hdf5 and then in ParaView we can just FindPackage(HDF5) and give
> our internal build tree as a hint. We would leave the USE_SYSTEM_HDF5 logic
> in place and if it is OFF then external_project will be called.
> 
> 
> 
> Just a word of caution: you can't simply use ExternalProject_Add and then
> use FindPackage within the same CMakeLists.txt file for a plain old ParaView
> build. You'd have to do a "super build" approach where both HDF5 and
> ParaView are built as ExternalProject_Add calls and then ParaView could use
> FindPackage to find the (configured/built/installed by previous build steps)
> HDF5.
> 
> You could do ExternalProject_Add to build HDF5 as long as everything that
> FindPackage currently sets gets set in a predictive fashion (*before* HDF5
> itself is downloaded, configured, built or installed...)
> 
> 
> Just thinking out loud, too,
> David C.
>