Comment by plorkyeran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plorkyeran | Hacker News Reader

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The author of that blog post wants something fundamentally different from what CMake is. The project files generated by it are just temporary build intermediates, and it makes no more sense to distribute them than it would the .d files generated by gcc -MD. Perhaps he is expecting it to be like autotools, where the generated Makefiles can be bundled in your tarballs so that people do not need autotools installed to build your project, but no meta-build-system other than autotools that I have encountered even tries to support that.

The author's claim that "a CMake-generated project cannot possibly be the final say" is so incorrect that I am not surprising that he found CMake frustrating. It is quite the opposite; if you ever find yourself manually editing the generated project files for any reason other than debugging build-system issues you're doing it wrong and are going to have a very bad time. You must always find a way to express the thing you need within the CMakeFiles.txt, which sometimes unfortunately requires awful hacks.

Amusingly the SO question he links to as evidence that editing the generated project file is required now has an answer saying how to do it properly...

> The project files generated by it are just temporary build intermediates, and it makes no more sense to distribute them than it would the .d files generated by gcc -MD

Nobody was talking about redistributing anything. I just said I should be able to move the folder from folder A to folder B.

Not sure what to even reply to the rest of your comment...

The author of the blog post you linked to talked a lot about redistributing generated files, and I assumed you linked to it because you agreed with the opinions he expressed.

After moving the project folder to a new location you just have to rerun the cmake command to update the project files. CMake attempts to do this automatically when you build.

[A] >>>>>> I just wish it would work with relative paths. It shouldn't break your build to move a folder around.

[B] >>>>> AFAIK cmake works perfectly fine with relative paths; what breaks?

[A] >>>> I don't think it works: https://ofekshilon.com/2016/08/30/cmake-rants/

[C] >>> it makes no more sense to distribute the project files

[A] >> Nobody was talking about redistributing anything. I just said I should be able to move the folder from folder A to folder B.

[C] > I assumed you linked to it because you agreed with the opinions he expressed.

You just randomly... "assumed"? and then changed the topic?

The most likely explanation is you didn't even read, given how off-topic the comment was.

Please... you wasted > 15 minutes of my time trying to figure out how to reply to your irrelevant comment without coming off as a total jerk. I know it's fun to lecture strangers about the Right (TM) way to use $technology, but maybe spend 10 seconds to read the discussion before doing that.

Actually, I think the reply was basically on target... The complaint in the section of the linked article that APPEARS to be relevant to throwaway613834 is "CMake’s treatment of paths", which is all about the fact that build artifacts of cmake have absolute paths. Build artifacts of cmake, however, are build _output_ and thus shouldn't be relocated, distributed, or checked in (I would argue relocation is a form of redistribution, it's just the simplest possible case). These build artifacts are the output of a specific build, thus they are (as pointed out) a lot like .d files which I also would expect regenerate in the new build environment post moving/modifying. Just like with .o/.d, I would expect to move/distribute/checkin after cleaning these build artifacts, and then regenerate them afterwards. Since this is pretty simple to do, I'm not sure it's worth such a long section in this blog. This is even pointed out (a couple times) in the blog comments. The author also even references why it works this way as a default: "It is really hard to make everything work with relative paths, and you don’t get that much out of it, except lots of maintenance issues and corner cases that do not work." Unless you have spent a while deep-diving into the issues, wouldn't it be prudent to accept the word of the maintainers as pretty close to canonical?

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