Book Image

CMake Best Practices

By : Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor
5 (2)
Book Image

CMake Best Practices

5 (2)
By: Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor

Overview of this book

CMake is a powerful tool used to perform a wide variety of tasks, so finding a good starting point for learning CMake is difficult. This book cuts to the core and covers the most common tasks that can be accomplished with CMake without taking an academic approach. While the CMake documentation is comprehensive, it is often hard to find good examples of how things fit together, especially since there are lots of dirty hacks and obsolete solutions available on the internet. This book focuses on helping you to tie things together and create clean and maintainable projects with CMake. You'll not only get to grips with the basics but also work through real-world examples of structuring large and complex maintainable projects and creating builds that run in any programming environment. You'll understand the steps to integrate and automate various tools for improving the overall software quality, such as testing frameworks, fuzzers, and automatic generation of documentation. And since writing code is only half of the work, the book also guides you in creating installers and packaging and distributing your software. All this is tailored to modern development workflows that make heavy use of CI/CD infrastructure. By the end of this CMake book, you'll be able to set up and maintain complex software projects using CMake in the best way possible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics
5
Part 2: Practical CMake – Getting Your Hands Dirty with CMake
14
Part 3: Mastering the Details

Chapter 10: Handling Big Projects and Distributed Repositories in a Superbuild

As we should have learned by now, every big project comes with its own set of dependencies. The easiest way of dealing with these dependencies is by using a package manager, such as Conan or vcpkg. But using a package manager might not always be possible or feasible, due to company policies, project requirements, or lack of resources. Thus, the project authors might consult the traditional, old-style ways to deal with the dependencies. The usual way of dealing with these dependencies may include shipping all dependencies embedded into the repository's build code. Alternatively, project authors may decide to let the end user deal with the dependencies from scratch. Neither of these ways is clean and has its own drawbacks. What if I told you there is a middle ground? Welcome to the super-build approach.

A super-build is a method that can be used for decoupling the logic required for satisfying dependencies...