Default dependencies for C project when using a package manager

[friendlyanon]

Default dependencies for C project when using a package manager

[cdecompilador]

I think this would be a good idea using the FetchContent feature in cmake by default (also having the option to select (vcpkg, etc, ...)

For example:

# --- External dependencies ---
FetchContent_Declare(
        Cli
        GIT_REPOSITORY "https://github.com/daniele77/cli.git"
        GIT_TAG "63eb02970fc19c2ba182be4c30d5dcd79e63f438"
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(Cli)
set(EXTERNAL_DEPS "cli")

I though that having a cmake-add command would also be great but that would be harder to implement, for example doing a cmake-add fmtlib/fmt would look in the common remote git repository providers for user fmtlib with repository fmt and add the respective FetchContent with the last commit, also a cmake-rm or cmake-update but these are just ideas.

[friendlyanon]

FetchContent is a form of vendoring and I heavily recommend against vendoring. For some things, it's just fine, like fetching m.css to generate docs. It's a purely developer process and it is opt-in even in developer mode.

For dependencies, it absolutely should not be used. add_subdirectory is not a package manager. a4a86d8 implements a tiny template engine for more complex templates, which will allow me to add PM code to generated projects.

I though that having a cmake-add command would also be great but that would be harder to implement, for example doing a cmake-add fmtlib/fmt would look in the common remote git repository providers for user fmtlib with repository fmt and add the respective FetchContent with the last commit, also a cmake-rm or cmake-update but these are just ideas.

Not feasible. Once the project is generated, it is in an unknown state and can't be safely edited programmatically. cmake-init --vcpkg is already pushing it a bit and I'm not sure that one is useful either, since I can just add examples to the wiki for what it does (and there is already one such entry in the wiki).

I also want the generated projects to be completely independent of this project, since its goal is to set people on the right track when dealing with CMake and related processes, meaning I don't want this to be another thing people have to learn in addition to existing, established tools.

[cdecompilador]

Yeah, thinking about it, linking this tool to the project structure would remove cmake potential.

[friendlyanon]

C projects have https://github.com/json-c/json-c as a dependency and https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2 as a dev dependency. I couldn't find a nice C testing library with the necessary CMake integration. See 05bfbfb