Buildsystem-agnostic package export format
The CMake package approach described in the cmake-packages(7) manual works well for consuming packages from CMake, but not for other tools or build systems. Ideally we should offer a format for install(EXPORT)
and export()
that is independent of CMake and more accessible to other tools.
Candidates include:
-
pkg-config
's.pc
files. This format is traditionally used to express command-line flags directly. That is not well-suited to CMake's cross-platform, toolchain-independent capabilities. -
The Common Package Specification (CPS). Work on this has stalled because it is unlikely to gain general acceptance until a dedicated effort has been made to attempt using
.pc
files, either succeeding or failing with a demonstration of fundamental limitations.
Some of these ideas have been discussed previously on our old mailman-based mailing lists (now superseded by the CMake Discourse Site):
- May 2018: [CMake] pkg-config file format versus CMake packages
- June 2018: [cmake-developers] Using pkgconf