[vtk-developers] Modules missing from the Standalone Group

Marcus D. Hanwell marcus.hanwell at kitware.com
Fri Jul 20 11:59:07 EDT 2012


On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Utkarsh Ayachit
<utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com> wrote:
>>> FWIW, it might have been a good idea to provide nonintrusive API to
>>> specify module groups.
>>
>> One suggestion along this route is to have groups just be special modules
>> with nothing in them but a list dependent modules.
>
> That sounds like a good idea. It would need some fixes (since
> currently it's not possible to have a module.cmake without a
> CMakeLists.txt), but +1 from me.

If there is a strong desire for that then we could probably add
something, but it would be easier to just let you do this in the
groups cmake file. I can see why you want this when establishing the
groups, but I would argue that it breaks the modularity and for
maintenance having that information with the module.cmake seems more
logical to me.

I think it is much nicer to add or remove a module by editing its
metadata (module.cmake) rather than centralizing that knowledge to one
or two files. That is why I implemented it this way, but groups are
somewhat special and could be implemented either way. If there is
consensus then I would much rather just add this information to
vtkGroups.cmake instead of further complicating the modules.

My $0.02, along with details on my thought processes as I wrote that
code. We will then have to ensure that the groups are synced with the
modules if their names change etc, it should normally be obvious
pretty quickly, but for less widely used groups this could go
unnoticed for longer periods.

Marcus



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