We already have nightly builds set up, so this would certainly be a possibility,
though I would have to think through how to make it work when we didn't have a
connection to our build server. I would still prefer, however, to have this
work locally. You mention that you set this up 5 years or so
But ExternalProject still does a checkout, configure and build step. (at least
if I read the docs correctly)
our goal was to minimize the amount of stuff you needed to build,
specifically,
if you were only working on 2 libs that were needed by 1 app, you could
checkout only those 2 libs.
We currently have a fair number of libraries, executables and external
dependencies with fairly complicated dependencies. As a simplified example,
consider the following diagram where dependencies flow from top to bottom (i.e.
higher depends on lower).
exe1 exe2
| | \
We don't modify external dependencies, but we do need to check them
out and build them before building a library or executable that depends on
them.
Sometimes a developer will be working in a single library or executable.
Sometimes he will be working in multiple libraries and/or
