It might be a good idea to add a -DBUILD_AUTO flag
that causes any
failing checks to simply disable the associated
functionality as Autotools does. If you want to see this please file an enhancement
bug report.
The defaults are not terribly important. What I'd like to see is a WITH_ALL flag similar to BUILD_ALL. I do like the idea of a BUILD_AUTO flag. When a needed dependency is not found, a message like:
libtiff.so not found. Disabling TIFF support.
Even better would be a summary of findings at the end of the cmake invocation. For instance, openssh gives the following at the end of configure: ... This tells the user exactly what is being built. If the user wants something else, he has a basis to determine what is missing (or extra) and make the appropriate changes.
Yes, this sounds palatable. As upstream providers we need to test everything. Right now doing that is cumbersome.
I understand that individual packagers don't want everything enabled. I don't either, but I am looking at this as an upstream provider and not just a packager. We can't test everything if most of the features are disabled by default.
Darrell