Let's say I have a project made of several subprojects A, B, C, D... All subprojects depends on A, which changes rather frequently. Plus, there might be some further dependencies: in this example, D depends on B.
Now: many people are working on these projects. The main CMakeLists.txt file should include all directories, so that the build all builds everything. But people would like also to be able to work only on one of these projects, and not having to build/install everything everytime.
If I am working on D, I can easily build "only" D by calling
cmake --build . --target D -- -j7
or
ninja -j7 D
This will also build A and B if something for them has changed. Perfect.
But how can I call install only for D without triggering build all? I would like that if I call:
ninja -j7 D install
it only built D (and dependencies) and then installed only D and its dependencies (A and B). Instead, it builds the target all and install all.
I would like to keep that the target all keep building everything. So EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL wouldn't be an option. But going in that direction I couldn't find any solution.
So I am thinking of the following strategy:
- Apart from subproject A, all other targets are set to EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL, and OPTIONAL at installation.
- I add one extra subproject that simply depends from all other sub-projects (maybe I make each target publish its name by using some variable set at PARENT_SCOPE), and people will have to call that when they want to build and install everything.
Is it going to work? Is there any better solution?
We would like to avoid that everybody has to edit the main CMakeLists.txt file to exclude projects he is not interested in. The solution should be portable to different OSs.
Edit: