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> without needing to create a CMakeLists.txt, adding a submodule for every dependency you use, including your dependency's cmake file, blah blah (xmake has its own xrepo tool which allows for dependency management in a MUCH easier way) You make it sound worse than it really is today. Using submodules for everything is the pre-vcpkg, pre-FetchContent, pre-ExternalProject way of including dependencies—more than half a decade out of date, and arguably more appropriate for GNU Autotools. With CMake and vcpkg, it's not that much harder: add vcpkg as a Git submodule, add a vcpkg.json, and use its CMake toolchain to bootstrap and install packages with find_package(), done. Said vcpkg.json can be as minimal as (taken from my own projects): {
dependencies: [
'spdlog',
'vulkan-sdk-components',
'libpng'
]
}
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- vcpkg: dependencies that have custom patches only relevant for my software or where maintainers apply patches once every six months, dependencies where the author doesn't do versioning and the correct version to use is git HEAD
- vcpkg: not sure how I can pass specific flags to dependencies. For instance I need to build LLVM with specific CMake flags.
- CMake FetchContent : how do you handle dependencies that are other repos from your organization which may definitely get patches as part of the development of the software? With FetchContent all those go into build directories and aren't treated as source, I would like to be able to tell CMake "for this build, use source folder /foo for dependency "foo" instead of cloning its 300MB repo again
- How do you handle dependencies that takes ages to build. My software uses Qt, llvm, libclang, ffmpeg and a fair amount of other things. When I tried with vcpkg, the experience building for a new contributor took something like three hours on an average laptop and required dozens of gigabytes of space (software build itself is ~5 minutes with the current precompiled SDK I ship). The space thing is critical, I often get students, interns, OSS contributors etc which definitely cannot afford 30GB of free space on cheap laptops with 256G SSDs