Re: [boost] Cmake

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Robert Ramey via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

On 6/24/17 7:20 AM, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:

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On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 1:59 AM, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:

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I've done a proof of concept for (2), which can be seen here:

https://github.com/pdimov/boost-cmake-demo-2

Thank you for investing the time to produce this demo.

I have identified the following (separate) scenarios:

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I don't know if its listed, but I am very interested in generating Visual Studio project files for certain Boost projects. I would be more motivated to help with the maintenance of any Boost library for which I can use my IDE, since I can set breakpoints and I am generally proficient with it.

First of all, I'd like to say that root post of this thread is very helpful in clarifying the options and costs and value for each one.

FWIW - I'm interested in this as well. I used the VS IDE for maintaining the Boost.Serialization library. It was very convenient to build, test, (especialy) debug the library. But it was a huge pain to setup and maintain for the hundreds targets. I swithed to Mac as my main development platform. It comes with Xcode. Setting this up to build, test and debug the library was even worse on this platform. Having spent some time figuring out CMake to compile information/advice on the incubator, I was able to make CMake files to build the serialization library. I had to deal with CMake quirks, FindBoost quirks etc. But now I can easily create a new XCode project from the CmakeLists.txt files which is a huge relief. It's much easier than trying to use XCode directly. The CMake files them selves are that complex - after you spend a lot of time fiddling. But now that's done and mostly a bad memory. The CMakeList.txt files are part of the Boost Serialization Library distribution so anyone is free to look at it to see what I had to do. I would hope that these file could also generate IDE project files for VS as well as Eclipse with no changes. But I'm not in a position to test that proposition. Note that this links with other boost libraries created with b2.

So I would add 7) or 8): Use CMake to generate an IDE project to build/test a particular library.

I've seen the innards, surface, and operation of the VS and Xcode projects generated by cmake and I'd loath to to use them. Hence I ask.. Would it be better to generate those with something else? Especially something that maps more directly to the b2 definitions. I don't know what else exist to do this. But just wondering since we are talking about a much smaller audience than N<5. -- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail