Subject: Re: [boost] Cmake
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-24 15:25:47
On 6/24/17 7:20 AM, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 1:59 AM, Peter Dimov via Boost
> <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> 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:
>
> 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.
Robert Ramey