This is more of a remark, or something to get the ball rolling, rather than
anything else.
I recently came across various FindModule.cmake files (FindOpenCL, FindOpenGL,
FindGLEW, FindGLM, FindSFML) as a sideeffect of a project I am developing, but
have had my share with quite a few others (FindQt, RustCMake, FindOpenAL,
FindBoost, …). My overall impression is that the quality of these modules is
highly fluctuating to say the least. While generally the FindModules shipping
with CMake as built-in scripts are usable, there is a fair amount of room for
improvement.
FindGLEW.cmake for eg. is terrible. I have never imagined that such a widely
used library has a 7 line FindModule script. On Windows it is practically
useless.
As for nearly all other FindModule scripts, nearly none of them use
target_include_libraries() that would allow for end-users of the scripts to not
have to worry about include directories.
Some projects strive at being cross-platform, but compiling them on Windows
(mostly the GNU projects that aim on being Windows friendly) is massive pain.
libJPEG to name just one provides nmake makefiles that are capable of producing
Visual Studio 2010 project files at best (huuraay), and have undocumented
external dependencies. These projects (and their users) cry out for CMake
support.
Here is a proposition to consider:
Kitware generally has the philosphy with CMake being: do it yourself or hire us
to do it. While on a corporate basis this is a legitimate approach, I as a poor
academic fellow do not have 10.000$ to spare for a feature I so wish, neither
do I have the time to educate myself in the internal ways of CMake to
contribute. So all I do is hack, hack, hack all day.
The Chocolatey project (a package manager for Windows) recently won a massive
Kickstarter campaign that aimed solely increasing the overall quality of the
project. With this campaign they aimed on growing from an ‘interesting idea’ to
begin ‘mainstream’. With the money they won, they hired full time package
moderators, developed automated scripts of facilitating authoring, wrote
tutorials, created templates, and even managed to get the ball rolling with
OneGet (Powershell 5.0 package manager manager) to adopt Chocolatey as the
first supported public repo.
I would suggest Kitware start a similar community funded project to increase
the overall quality of the software. While I do not have 10 grands to buy a
feature, I do have 10 dollars pocket money to contribute (as do MANY others).
As several levels of goals, the stock FindModules scripts could be brought to a
homogenous quality, identical naming conventions (no more MYLIB_INC_DIR,
MYLIB_INCLUDE_DIRS, MyLib_INCLUDE_DIR), high quality templates for new
adopters, make the CMake Guide freely available online (epub, pdf, docx,
whatever), convert 10 GNU projects to CMake, convert 50 GNU projects to CMake,
create Snappy back-end of CPack, or my personal favorite (the feature I do not
have 10.000 dollars for) is NMake batch mode support for multicore build, etc.
There are so many places CMake itself can be improved, and so many users who
really should be adopting, but have not started due to lacking man power.
(These are the projects that would benefit the most from a freely available
tutorial, because truth be told: writing capable, high-quality CMake scripts is
no easy task.)
If I were a charmismatic spokesperson I’d say: I RAISE 10 DOLLARS, WHO’S WITH
ME?! But because I’m not, I’ll just leave it here as a suggestion.
Ideas?
--
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