Hello everyone! I am an experienced C++ developer looking to get involved in the broader C++ community. I saw @dsankel’s CppCon talk and the Beman project looks like it’s exactly what I’m looking for. In addition to C++, I have extensive CMake experience, so I’m looking for a little direction about how I can best help.
To propose one possible starting point, I noticed the exemplar doesn’t currently appear to generate/install a CMake config-file package. Is that something we’re interested in adding? If so, do we want the config-file package to support different variants of target sets (e.g. static, shared, static-pic, etc)? That’s something that I’ve implemented in the past, and I think some Google projects might have started doing it, too.
Also open to other suggestions. Happy to take on development of a standard proposal, or even talk about proposing a collectiion of unordered set algorithms that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this project!
There’s many ways to get involved, but cmake help is honestly perfectly timed. We’ve been having some long discussions about how best to deal with some issues. The big discussion is currently here, but there’s been discussions in our weekly tagup that I think didn’t get summarized here. Anyway, it’s very much an open topic at the moment.
Good question! I suspect @bretbrownjr will have some thoughts, but I don’t actually know if there is consensus here. I think CMake best practices are still a bit of a moving target. Personally, I was highly influenced by this article by Alex Reinking. It emphasizes the following points.
The build interface should match the install interface.
Only strict build requirements belong in CMakeLists.txt.
A single project [is unlikely to] mix both shared and static versions of a library.
That’s the philosophy I use when packaging software for my job and it seems to have worked pretty well so far. I will work on a PR so we have something a little more concrete to talk about. Let me know if that’s moving to quickly and I will slow down.
Thanks, @Jeff-Garland, I did see there is a lot of discussion around CMake, esp. w/respect to the test framework. That’s definitely something I will keep an eye on.
W.r.t. the weekly discussions, those are during work hours, and given the nature of my work I am unlikely to be able to attend regularly. I’m not asking for any accommodation; I just hope that being unable to attend won’t be too much of an issue.
Not a problem w.r.t. the weekly tag-up. If we really need to have a discussion that isn’t here we can always set something up dedicated to the topic that will work for you and others. Look forward to the PR.
PR submitted!. It’s not complete yet (see the PR comment), but I wanted to get some feedback on the direction I’m going before going too far down the rabbit hole.
Sorry for the delays on the PR’s - lots of us have been busy with Hagenberg c++ meeting etc. I merged the first one and updated the second one – so hopefully we can close these out shortly. From my view these look like solid corrections to the cmake for best practices – definitely appreciated
