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Comment by BeeOnRope | Hacker News Reader

How would you lay out the directory structure for the diamond dependency shape discussed in the post? Specifically, where would "base" live?

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  root/
    base/
    a/
    b/

As long as root has a CMakeLists.txt and includes base, a, and b, cmake will figure it out. After the build tree has been built with cmake, you can even run make from the build/root/a/ directory and base/ and a/ will be built. The author, for some reason, does not want a cmakelists.txt in root/ and wants to run cmake from a or b alone so they have to use a more convoluted approach.

One reason against the CMakeLists.txt at the root: When you generate a Visual Studio "solution", every target becomes a "project". At work this results in a few hundred projects and VS gets slow. Someone build a Python script to trim it down. This is treating symptoms instead of root causes and adds accidental complexity.

Of course, the root CMake also needs to parse all sub directories which requires time. However, this has not been a big problem in practice so far. Only on the "annoying" level.

That sounds like you've just got too many projects. Why not merge them? You also save wasted time on linking static libraries (at least on Linux this is significant, dunno about windows).

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