Re: [Doxygen-develop] CMake

[Dimitri v. H. <do...@gm...>]

Hi Robert,

On Jun 7, 2013, at 2:21 , Robert Dailey <rcd...@gm...> wrote:

> 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!

It is not problem for me to host the packages, and I do need them myself when I
build a doxygen release. So for Windows (32bit/64bit + debug/release flavors) and 
MacOSX (32bit+64bit intel fat binaries for OSX 10.5+) this seems like a good approach. 
For Linux, however, it would be better to depend on the packages that come with 
a distribution (there are too many distros to support).

Can CMake be configured like that? or is it one approach or the other for all platforms.

Regards,
 Dimitri