Adopting the beast

[dyfet]

This weekend I had been more formally adopting Areg into my regular workflow. Because it's large and has rather different development concepts, there are different issues I encountered that may be relevant to others.

For me, as I primarily use Alpine Linux, I found it easiest to work on Areg with VSC. The only thing missing is a default CMakePresets.json, so I am proposing to add one, probably based on the one I use in ModernCLI. Of course, on Windows with Visual Studio I imagine most people would simply use the included solution file instead. But on other platforms, the CMakePresets.json works well with VSC and made it very easy to do a build. Some might use Idea C-Lion or maybe QtCreator. I think it is possible to accommodate all these different users.

This discussion is really to see what kind of configurations and requirements others might have for different environments, what might be worth adding to the repo (such as a cmake presets),and if any others are similar to mine.

Also, I should note, I am an Alpine Linux packager. Pa5t of this discussion could well be about whether and how Areg might be packaged for different distributions and systems (I am also familiar with Debian, RedHat, and Arch packaging, as well as FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc). Do people need such packages?

[aregtech]

That’s a very good point 👍

CMakePresets.json can certainly make things smoother. The only consideration is that areg-sdk needs to stay compiler- and platform-agnostic, so presets should be optional helpers rather than “defaults” everyone is expected to use.

I’d support adding a well-documented CMakePresets.json as a convenience, including cross-platform and cross-compile options, while keeping the plain cmake -B build workflow as the baseline.

I’m also open to optimizing and simplifying the cmake build. There’s a user.cmake with areg-specific options. I’m fine with refining, reworking, or even removing parts of it. I’ll admit CMake isn’t my strongest side, so I’d really value input from others 🙂

[dyfet]

By default cmake ignores the CMakePresets.json unless --presets is used,, so I found it easiest to simply include one by default in all my packages. VSC's cmake extension really expects there to be a preset file, too. The one I use was actually originally produced by Visual Studio, and then hand modified. I actually do a .gitignore for CMakeUserPresets.json, so the user can stick a local user one and not have that get back into the repo, and just carry CMakePresets.json in my repos. The thing to verify is whether github ci picks it up... hopefully not. I used to use gitlab ci...