CMake Find Packages and Bio++

[Thomas BIGOT]

Hi,

I’m packaging projects using bpp libs , and I sometimes meet a limitation.
There is no way, if my project use CMake, to find packages with the built-in
command FIND_PACKAGE.
For instance, to compile against boost, I can write:
find_package(Boost COMPONENTS mpi serialization REQUIRED)

Whereas with bpp, I have to use:
IMPROVED_FIND_LIBRARY(BPP bpp-phyl Bpp/Phyl/Tree.h)

which has several drawbacks:
— one cannot specify a peculiar version,
— one cannot require peculiar components,
— one has to specify a path to a header file,
— one has to include the « improved_find_library » macro.


To address this, I propose to write a find_package module for Bio++ which would
allow to do that:
find_package(Bio++ 2.0.3 COMPONENTS phyl REQUIRED)
once Bio++ would be installed on a system.


If I wrote such a module, would you be interested in including it in Bio++
next package? Is somebody already working on it?

Anyway, thanks for having including « IMPROVED_FIND_LIBRARY »: even if it has
some limitation, it saved our lives a lot of times! :)

Cheers,
Thomas.
--
Thomas Bigot, PhD — Research Engineer @ Ancestrome Project
Biometry and Evolutionary Biology Lab / University of Lyon
http://lbbe.univ-lyon1.fr/-Bigot-Thomas-.html — Tel: +33 4 72 43 35 82

[Nicolas Rochette]

Hi Thomas,

This is a good idea that I think has been somewhere on the TODO list for
some time.

However it is not clear to me how a *non-root* user is going to use the
CMake module in practice (module path? And will the module be identical
across versions?). Also this would have to work on both Linux and OSX.
If you can solve those issues simply then go ahead !

Best,

Nicolas