[vtk-developers] CMake.

[Bill Hoffman]

Thanks for the comments.

At 11:07 AM 9/30/2001 +0530, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

>CMake issues:
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>When building, I used CMakeSetup (FLTK version).  This refers to CMake
>version 0.93 checked out from CVS.  Maybe this part of the message
>should go to the CMake lists but I dont know.
>
>  (1) It ran pretty well, except the list widgets gave me trouble and
>  there were focus related problems and I had to a little voodoo
>  before I could see a cursor inside a text entry area.

This is a general problem with creating portable GUI's that work on UNIX machines.
Our goal in cmake was to require the minimum set of tools possible to build cmake.
No tcl/python/tk/etc.   We don't want people having to install several packages before
they can even start building cmake.  On windows this works good, because there is 
a standard widget set available to use (MFC).   However, on UNIX, an FLTK gui was 
contributed to cmake, but FLTK seems to have trouble running consistently across 
platforms.   

So, I guess the only widget set that is guaranteed to be found on a UNIX system is Xt or Xaw.
Are there any volunteers that would be interested in developing/maintaining a 
new cmake GUI for any of those widget sets?  Is there some widget set that I don't know about
that comes standard on all UNIX machines?

The only other option is to create a text based interface for cmake.  (Perhaps use curses??)
I think this could be done, and make things better.  It would work something like this:

prompt% CMakeSetup  [path to source]

Main Menu:
c.)  Configure 
f.)  Finish
q.)  Quit
l.)  List New Cache Entires
a.)  List All Cache Entries
e.)  Edit Entry
Enter Choice:  c

Configure......


New Cache Entries are as follows:

1. Comment: Name of build.
   BUILDNAME=CYGWIN_NT-5.0-1.3.2_0.39_3_2_-c++

2. Comment: Build source documentation using doxygen
   BUILD_DOXYGEN=OFF

3. Comment: Build the testing tree.
    BUILD_TESTING=ON

.....  (all of the entries generated in the last Configure step would be listed)


Main Menu:
c.)  Configure 
f.)  Finish
q.)  Quit
l.)  List New Cache Entires
a.)  List All Cache Entries
e.)  Edit Entry Number
Enter Choice:  e3
BUILD_TESTING=ON  Enter new value [Enter to keep]:OFF
BUILD_TESTING=ON  Enter new value [Enter to keep]:
c.)  Configure 
f.)  Finish
q.)  Quit
l.)  List New Cache Entires
a.)  List All Cache Entries
e.)  Edit Entry Number

Enter Choice:  f

Final Configure......

You are read to run make.



Does this sound worthwhile to implement?  Are there any volunteers to help build a better
UNIX GUI?   I think having both a text based UI, and a better GUI might be the best
for UNIX.


>  (3) CMake itself seems to support no command line arguments.  I
>  can't even do $ cmake --version.

cmake --help