If your project is open source and you want to have any chance of it ever
being included in any of the major Linux distros without making somebody
very angry at you, forget about add_subdirectory() for external
dependencies.
On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Theodore Papadopoulo <
theodore.papadopo...@inria.fr> wrote:
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> On 02/04/2013 09:23 AM, Ansis Māliņš wrote:
> > If I have a dependency (e.g. SDL2) that seems to work with
> > add_subdirectory just fine, should I still use ExternalProject_Add
> > instead? Given both ways work, what should I prefer? What are the
> > tradeoffs?
>
> This is just my view on this topic.
> Personnally, I prefer using add_subdirectory even though
> ExternalProject_Add is probably cleaner (no possible interaction
> between variables of different subdirs).
>
> Why do I prefer the add_subdirectory, well mostly because:
>
> 1) ExternalProject_Add and add_subdirectory do not play very well
> together. External_Project_Add does all its work at make time, so that
> all UseXXX et al are not generated at configure time. So if you use a
> add_subdirectory for a project with a dependency that its build with
> ExternalProject_Add that will not work.
>
> 2) When you use External_Project_add with a download, and get a
> compilation error, you tend to correct some sources that are placed in
> the build directory which can be very easily removed... This probably
> can be corrected with some External_Project_add magic, but I do not
> know if you can strictly separate the build from the source stuffs.
>
> 3) That being said, it is true that External_Project_add is a little
> bit cleaner and should work directly with subprojects that have a
> functionning build system (not necessarily cmake by the way which is
> another advantage). Using add_subdirectory requires to avoid
> conflicting variables and often some changes from
> CMAKE_{SOURCE,BINARY}_DIR to CMAKE_CURRENT_{SOURCE,BINARY}_DIR.
> The same thing can be said for cmake macros (which one do you take), ...
>
> Still, when add_subdirectory works, it is in my view simpler and better.
>
> Theo.
>
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