Supporting the CMake file API in the project/build plugin ?

[Waqar Ahmed]

I think with cmake, things are not going to be as simple as with git.
With git, we just invoke the command, get the files and we are done.
With CMake things are a bit more complex, we first need to figure out
which build directory to be used and probably provide the user a way
to select one and there is a protocol for making requests to cmake and
getting responses by re-running cmake. Thus, in my opinion, it would
be better to let a dedicated plugin handle this. That plugin can write
out the project file and project plugin will automatically detect
that.

On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 11:44 PM <christoph at cullmann.io> wrote:
>
> On 2023-09-06 23:32, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > currently cmake can generate a kate project file, and then, when kate
> > opens
> > some file in the buildtree, e.g. the project file, the kate project
> > plugin reads
> > the project file and populates the list of files and the build targets.
> > With cmake 3.27 this has been marked officially as obsolete (even
> > though the
> > kate project generator gained some features in cmake 3.27).
> >
> > Nevertheless, medium term it would be better if kate would use the
> > cmake file
> > API.
> > What would that mean ?
> > kate could search the CMakeCache.txt for CMAKE_PROGRAM, which contains
> > the
> > path to the cmake executable which generated this buildtree.
> > Then kate would write some simple json file into the build tree, and
> > then rerun
> > cmake on that buildtree.
> > cmake will see the file kate has written, and generate a json file
> > which
> > contains the source directory, the list of targets, the source files
> > for each
> > target.
> > With this information kate could:
> > - use that list of source files as project files, or use the git/svn
> > support in
> > kate to get all files which are in the source directory
> > - get  the list of targets and generate a build target for each of
> > them. Those
> > could be executed by running cmake (so it would automatically work for
> > any
> > build tree, whether it is ninja, make, or msvc): cmake --build
> > <buildir> --
> > config <Config> --target <target>
> >
> > What do you suggest how this would fit into the project- and
> > build-plugins ?
> > I guess the session support is not related ?
>
> Hi,
>
> thanks for taking a look at that!
>
> I think that would fit into the project plugin as another auto-discovery
> mode,
> like we have it for the various version control systems.
>
> There we execute the git/.../... commands.
>
> Greetings
> Christoph
>
> >
> > Thanks
> > Alex