Configuring

Alright, all the necessary tools and libraries are available on your machine. What’s next? As with every CMake-based project, we now need to configure our build and create appropriate makefiles.

However, there is an important difference from most CMake-based projects. Jancy build system does not rely on CMake find_package facility to find dependencies. Why not?

First of all - find_package simply does not work reliably on Windows. Here you would need to set up an extra layer of path configuration variables and then provide these paths as hints to find_package. This effectively voids the whole idea behind find_package – it’s you, not find_package, who is doing the actual “finding”!

Another important reason – find_package is not convenient to use in situations when you need to switch between different versions of the same library, between Debug/Release builds, between static/dynamic libraries, between different processor architectures during cross-compilation and so on.

In other words, find_package is really convenient on Unix systems when all you do is a native build with the default versions of installed tools and libraries. Need more flexibility? Then find_package alone is not the answer.

• paths.cmake
• CMake Configuration Step