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 4: Packaging, Deploying, and Installing a CMake Project

Building a software project is only half the story. The other half is about delivering and presenting the software to your consumers. Consumers are the biggest stakeholders of any project, even if you are writing a hobby project for yourself. These consumers may have a variety of experiences and purposes. They might be developers, package maintainers, power users, or the average Joes. It is important to understand their use cases, scenarios, and requirements. Since the software is mostly abstract, let's assume that your project is baked beans instead – it may be delicious and may smell good in the factory, but improper packaging will reduce its shelf life, making it hard to transport or consume. This will make your product less likely to be desired by the consumers. Even though your product is wonderful at the start, the consumer will not notice it since their experience with your product is bad due to bad...