From: Matthew Rogers <mattr94@xxxxxxxxx> Some users have expressed interest in a more "batteries included" way of building via CMake[1], and a big part of that is providing easier access to tooling external tools. A straightforward way to accomplish this is to make it as simple as possible is to enable the generation of the compile_commands.json file, which is supported by many tools such as: clang-tidy, clang-format, sourcetrail, etc. This does come with a small run-time overhead during the configuration step (~6 seconds on my machine): Time to configure with CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=TRUE real 1m9.840s user 0m0.031s sys 0m0.031s Time to configure with CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=FALSE real 1m3.195s user 0m0.015s sys 0m0.015s This seems like a small enough price to pay to make the project more accessible to newer users. Additionally there are other large projects like llvm [2] which has had this enabled by default for >6 years at the time of this writing, and no real negative consequences that I can find with my search-skills. NOTE: That the compile_commands.json is currently produced only when using the Ninja and Makefile generators. See The CMake documentation[3] for more info. 1: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAOjrSZusMSvs7AS-ZDsV8aQUgsF2ZA754vSDjgFKMRgi_oZAWw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ 2: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/2c5712051b31b316a9fc972f692579bd8efa6e67 3: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS.html Signed-off-by: Matthew Rogers <mattr94@xxxxxxxxx> --- contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt | 4 ++++ 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) diff --git a/contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt b/contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt index be6d9659c387..399a3cd6c071 100644 --- a/contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt +++ b/contrib/buildsystems/CMakeLists.txt @@ -57,6 +57,10 @@ if(NOT WIN32) set(USE_VCPKG OFF CACHE BOOL FORCE) endif() +if(NOT DEFINED CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS) + set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS TRUE) +endif() + if(USE_VCPKG) set(VCPKG_DIR "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/compat/vcbuild/vcpkg") if(NOT EXISTS ${VCPKG_DIR}) -- gitgitgadget