Do I really need cmake for build automation?

Question

I'm currently investigating cmake to allow automatic building on the Win32 platform. For all runtimes and libraries I'd like to build, Visual Studio (2008/2010) projects do allready exist.

I've come across cmake, but I'm unsure if I really need it. As the documentation says, cmake generates VS projects and they then can be built eg using MSBuild.

As the projects itself allready do exist (and build nicely via the IDE or MSBuild on the cmd line), what do I need and use cmake for? Just for directory/project folder traversal? Build failure reporting?

Regards, Paul

Answer 1

Well, strictly speaking you do not need it. However, it does give you a few advantages:

1. The idiomatic way to use CMake, forces you to use out-of-source builds. Arguable, but I am personally convinced that these keep you source-repository very clean.

2. You can support multiple visual studio versions (with the out-of-source builds). Perhaps it will be a little easier to port your project to other compilers (from MinGW -> Linux GCC).

3. With the find_package and config.cmake files, and a large number of available findXXX modules, CMake makes it a lot easier to "import" third-party libraries into your build-chain.

Answer 2

You don't need it. Cmake is only useful if you are trying to keep the same source code able to build in multiple platforms and compilers. If you are simply building using the microsoft stack you have no need of it.