Hi Eric,
Thanks for the hint regarding dumping variables: That's good to know!
However, I was learning that working with CMake is in may ways a question of
adopting some "good practice", but it is not really being enforced by the
language. One of the things that are for me part of this good practice would be
to deal with targets and their dependencies, and properties. Which means a
certain degree of modularity in the sense that you can easily plug projects
together by just referring to targets, like by calling find_package().
But again: You will never easily know what a package is actually giving you -
without investing hours and days of code reading - and maybe not even then!
But calling some "dump_targets" function after "find_package" (or also before
and after - for comparison) would give you a chance to know the effect of
endless "code deserts" with one line of code.
And because this is so fundamental in my eyes, I still almost assume that also
for targets and properties there must be some function available - which I
simply have not found yet!??
Or else I would consider this an urgent feature request!
Best regards,
Cornelis
Am Freitag, September 20, 2019 15:07 CEST, Eric Doenges <doen...@mvtec.com>
schrieb:
I don't know about the targets, but you can get all variables currently defined
for a directory by reading the VARIABLES property, e.g.
get_property(_variables DIRECTORY "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}" PROPERTY VARIABLES)
I use this to dump the variables into a file so I can see with which variable
settings my build directory was configured with.
With kind regards,
EricAm 20.09.19 um 14:49 schrieb Cornelis Bockemühl:
Right now I am fighting my way through large amounts of CMake code (actually
working on a ParaView custom application with many own plugins, views, domains,
property widgets etc. etc.), and it is sometimes really not easy not to lose
track completely! Sometimes I am happy to be back into complex C++ programming
- because I see much more logic in the entire thing. And it is of course no
news that CMake code is not famous for being easy to debug.
Anyway, I am dreaming of some "simple" features that would sometimes help a
lot, and it is all about "dumping" some kind of data. Actually this is for me
often also the favorite way to debug C++ code: just print out the values of
variables, arrays, etc. - e.g. if setting a breakpoint in the debugger is
difficult because you are interested only in the 928773th occurrence of a
certain piece of code (without even knowing that number...).
Accordingly in CMake code I am working a lot with the message() function - but
within that code the problem is often that you do not even know which variables
would be available at all!
Thus functions like would be really great to have:
“give me a list of all currently known targets”
“give me a list of all properties of a target”
“give me a list of all currently defined variables”
etc.
What I do not know is: Are this things that already exist - in which case I
would be happy if somebody could tell me how to find them! -, or are these
functions rather "feature requests"?
In fact I can hardly believe that I am the first with such kind of dreams, so
my hope is still that they already exist somewhere...--
Dr. Eric Dönges
Senior Software Engineer
MVTec Software GmbH | Arnulfstr. 205 | 80634 Munich | Germany
doen...@mvtec.com | Tel: +49 89 457 695-0 | www.mvtec.com
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