Potential CMake build recipe refresh?

[halleysfifthinc]

Potential CMake build recipe refresh?

[chrisdembia]

I welcome upgrades to Simbody's CMake files! All the internal cleanup sounds good. Most likely, we don't need to build versioned/unversioned/static/dynamic simultaneously. Some considerations are OpenSim developers and contributors who might install different versions of Simbody, and perhaps conda packaging: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/simbody

[sherm1]

Great analysis -- thanks, Allen! As you probably surmised you are looking at a very old CMake system that grew uglier over time for reasons that have been lost in antiquity. It would definitely benefit from a rewrite to use modern CMake best practices. One of the problems with an open source project is that we don't know who is using Simbody and what features they depend on. The biggest user I know of is the OpenSim project at Stanford. @aymanhab is the lead developer and whatever we do with the build system we should make sure it is still usable by him! @chrisdembia may also know of some features that are important to preserve.

Regarding the other odd features like static/dynamic and versioning, I think we could announce here and on the Simbody forum what we're considering removing to see if there are objections. I would certainly be glad to see some energy go into the Simbody build to bring it into the 21st century.