Re: [boost] Boost building with CMake

From: Bill Hoffman (bill.hoffman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-10 00:02:50

Michael Marcin wrote:
> I'm confused as to what CMake actually does.  Is it just a generator for 
> various makefile/IDE projects from a common description?  Does it do 
> dependency tracking and incremental builds?  Does it do MD5 summing?  I gave 
> a cursory glance at the website but didn't find my answers.
>
>   
It does do dependency tracking if the native build system does not 
already do it. 
> For what I read in this thread it sounds like if I'm building my 
> documentation it should spit out a vcproj which and then open and hit build 
> on which then builds my quickbook application and all the libraries it 
> depends on if they don't exist or aren't up to date and then runs quickbook 
> to generate my boostbook xml then runs xlst-proc to generate my html 
> documentation.  I don't really understand how that is possible.
>
>   
It is possible with custom commands in vcproj files.  CMake abstracts 
custom commands so
you can pretty much run any tool and produce any output you want.  VTK 
and QT both use
code generation.  The code generators can be built and then run to 
create code that is
then compiled.   So, running executables to produce pretty much any 
output is possible
from CMake, and works with VS IDE, nmake, make, Xcode, etc.

-Bill