New build system

[Marc]

As you may know, there have been a rewrite of the CMake scripts going on for quite some time; this thread attempts to explain and document the basics of the new build system.

This post will be updated over time. It is kind of a draft, so please do ask any questions you have and point out missing information.

Intro

Goals:

• use a vanilla, modern cmake style, more maintainable than the current system;
• allow installation (“make install”) — and later, packaging;
• make each project independent (you install the sofa libraries, and then build only your own plugins).

This happens on the build-system branch:

git checkout build-system

Building things

Build Sofa:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/directory /path/to/sofa/source/tree
make
make install

Build a plugin

You can still build the public plugins at the same time as Sofa (via
the cmake options), yet they are independent projects. If you are
a developer of a given plugin, you are better off building it
independently.

mkdir build
cd build
CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/sofa cmake /path/to/the/plugin/source/tree
make

Writing a CMakeLists.txt

Minimal example

This build system provides cmake package configuration files, which
simply means you can use the find_package() cmake command to find Sofa
headers and libraries.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
project(MyPlugin)

find_package(SofaFramework REQUIRED)

add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} SHARED \<my source files\>)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} SofaCore)

More generally, the content of the repository has been split in the following packages:

• SofaFramework (helper, defaulttype, core)
• SofaSimulation (simulation*)
• SofaBase, SofaCommon, SofaGeneral, SofaAdvanced, SofaMisc (modules)

You can use them in CMake with:

find_package(<sofa-package>)

and them use a library with:

target_link_libraries(<mylib> <sofa-library>)

This will both

• add the include directories of <sofa-library>
• link <mylib> against <sofa-library>

Using a plugin as a library

If a plugin can be used as a library, it provides cmake config files, e.g.
the ‘image’ plugin is used as a library by ‘Flexible’:

find_package(image QUIET)
if(image_FOUND)
    list(APPEND HEADER_FILES "quadrature/ImageGaussPointSampler.h")
    [...]
endif()

[...]

if(image_FOUND)
    target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} image)
    set(FLEXIBLE_COMPILER_FLAGS "${FLEXIBLE_COMPILER_FLAGS} -DSOFA_HAVE_IMAGE")
endif()

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