find_package(Foo REQUIRED)

[Allen Winter]

On Tuesday 16 June 2009 5:36:14 pm Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 June 2009, Allen Winter wrote:
> > Howdy,
> >
> > Maybe this should be a feature of cmake itself.. but I wish for
> > find_package(Foo REQUIRED) to print a nicer message
> > if Foo is not found.
> >
> > We have the macro_log_feature() stuff for the optional packages
> > which creates the nice summary at the end of the cmake run,
> > but when required FOO is not found all we get is a terse error and quit.
> >
> > I wonder.. can we overload find_package() with a COMMENT option?
> > i.e.
> > find_package(Foo REQUIRED COMMENT "Foo is a critical library and this
> > software cannot be build without it. Please install Foo
> > <http://www.foo.org> version 2.9 or higher")
> >
> > and have the COMMENT printed on termination?
> >
> > Or maybe there is already something like this and I'm not seeing it?
> 
> The second argument to find_package_handle_standard_args() can be 
> either "DEFAULT_MSG", then the default message is printed, or it can be a 
> custom message. I think this should be good enough ?
> But until now nobody inserted custom messages there.
> 
Not quite good enough because most of the REQUIRED FindFoo.cmake's 
are not ours -- they belong to CMake itself.

For example, kdelibs requires: GIF, JPEG, LibXml2, LibXslt, PNG, ZLIB and Perl
all of which have their Finder inside of CMake.