Re: [boost] Request for a "Policy Review" regarding 'CMakeLists.txt'

On Tuesday, 17 May 2016 17:56:04 MSK Thijs van den Berg wrote:

On 17 May 2016 at 16:37, Vladimir Prus wrote:

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On 17/05/2016 17:11, Thijs van den Berg wrote:

May I ask how often do you edit Jamfiles? It do it somewhat often, and I

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do find having them in subdirectory to be a burden.

My point is that you can keep doing so.. your Jamefiles editing will not

be affected if a CMakeLists.txt get's added to the root.

Looks like you did not answer this question directly, and accepted my statement that having build files under 'build' is a burden. Therefore, I assume you'll have no objections to moving all Jamfiles to root level of their corresponding components, should guidelines be modified to allow that?

That would cause confusion with developers who are accustomed to the

current setup, I don't know of any gain people get from that would outweights the inflicted confusion by such a change. Having the CMakeLists.txt at the root instead of somewhere else *does* have a gain: it's sticking to conventions that CMake users are accustomed to.

Any bjam conventions discussion, validation historical choices etc is a separate discussion. This discussion here is if we should pave the way to facilitate CMake users and do so correctly by sticking to accepted conventions, and add the CMakeLists.txt to the root or not.

I think whatever outcome of this discussion is, it should put all build systems in the same conditions. If the guideline is to put everything build-related into the build subdirectory then this should concern every build system a library happens to use, including Boost.Build, CMake, Makefiles, IDE projects and whatnot. If it's the library root then, again, all build system files should be there. Personally, I don't like having lots of files in the root directory, so I slightly favor the current convention. I understand that it is not the typical setup for CMake, but it really isn't such a big deal as some in this discussion are trying to put it. I should say that many opensource projects practice a separate directory for build-related stuff and it doesn't hurt anyone (quite the contrary, I'd say).