how to improve cmake support in kdevelop/ kdevelop support in cmake

[Matt Rogers]

On Sunday 14 May 2006 06:09, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sunday 14 May 2006 12:44, Hamish Rodda wrote:
> > On Sunday 14 May 2006 19:49, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > > On Sunday 14 May 2006 03:17, Matt Rogers wrote:
> > > > On Saturday 13 May 2006 15:43, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > >
> > > ...
> > >
> > > > > Why is it unacceptable to improve the kdevelop support in cmake ?
> > > >
> > > > It is not, but the goal is to provide native cmake support in
> > > > kdevelop. enhancing cmake to improve whatever kdevelop support is
> > > > provided via custom makefiles does not help us towards the goal of
> > > > providing native cmake support in kdevelop.
> > >
> > > As it is now, cmake generates project files for "custom projects". This
> > > way without enhancements we won't get optimal integration.
> > > But there is nothing which hinders us to improve the kdevelop generator
> > > in cmake and/or create a new project type in kdevelop so that they work
> > > much better together.
> > > (which still doesn't help with modifiyng the files)
> >
> > As an interim measure, supporting better cmake created .kdevelop files
> > would be ok, as long as the effort is trivial in comparison to that
> > needed to get full cmake support in kdevelop.
>
> I think these are really two different tasks.
>
> Creating as-good-as-possible build files for different build tools is the
> main idea behind cmake. So creating really good ones for kdevelop fits
> naturally into cmake and shouldn't be that hard. We just have to define a
> file format and dump the data we need into this file in cmake.
> With this enhancement every project with cmake files can be used very
> nicely with kdevelop (just that these files still have to be handwritten).
>

KDevelop is not a build tool! KDevelop is an IDE, which means that it needs to 
be able provide a frontend for a build tool. Your thinking is backwards. 
KDevelop should be providing support for CMake, not CMake providing support 
for KDevelop, unless that support is in the form of an API kdevelop can hook 
into to manipulate CMake files. 

You might argue that CMake supports Visual C++, and IMO, that is completely 
different. I'd wager most windows developers don't have a clue about how to 
setup or run nmake from a command line, which leaves only VC++, so they have 
to support it or take the huge risk of being completely non-relevant.

The point of any sort of build tool support in KDevelop is so that developers 
do not have to write by hand the files they need for their build system.

> A tool for editing these files can be seen as a completely independent
> project. (maybe) ideally it could be written in plain Qt4, so it would be
> available for all platforms. This one could provide a shared lib which
> offers a widget, which IDE's (as kdevelop) can simply use.
>
> Bye
> Alex

A seperate app still can't be done without a lot of extra work on the app 
developers part and that extra work is a waste of time seeing as how the 
CMake developers have already written all the necessary code to do this. 
--
Matt