Re: [Doxygen-develop] CMake

[Robert D. <rcd...@gm...>]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Robert Dailey <rcd...@gm...> wrote:
> Starting a new discussion thread here in the dev mailing list for
> CMake support. I'll be working on this over on my github fork:
> https://github.com/rcdailey/doxygen
>
> I'll be spending my spare time on this so please forgive any slow progress :)

Concerning third party dependencies that you do not build yourself as
part of your make command, would you be able to maintain your own
binaries for these in a repository?

I already have a CMake framework that I can drop into doxygen and use.
To be the most platform agnostic, I have set it up to download
archives of precompiled binaries for third party libraries from an
FTP/HTTP/Windows file share of your choosing (configurable in CMake
cache). Basically for every platform or toolchain you plan to build
doxygen on or with, you will need to have include files + binaries in
an archive. Those will sit in a repository and the CMake scripts will
download them, extract them, and automatically setup include
directories and dependencies for you.

There are a couple of benefits to having this approach:
1. No need to search for these libraries on the system. The CMake
scripts will always be able to guarantee that they are on the  system
since it will be downloading them from a repository you maintain.
2. Easier for new developers to just pick up the code and start
building, since they do not have to spend time building libraries.
3. Windows doesn't have an apt-get (unless you use cygwin, which is
just another dependency to worry about) mechanism, so this makes up
for that and makes it super easy to get a build started on Windows.

The downside, of course, is that this can become a maintenance problem
if you have a ton of libraries and/or platforms or toolchains to
support.

Let me know how you want to approach this, as it will deeply impact
the work. Personally I suggest we take this approach, assuming you can
setup an FTP/HTTP server somewhere to pull down the archives. I will
also post this in the dev mailing list, as I have created a dedicated
thread there for CMake discussion. Join me there!