CMake Cookbook

How it works

We could have put all the code into one source file. This would be impractical; every edit would require a full recompilation. Splitting source files into smaller, more manageable units makes sense. We could have equally well compiled all sources into a single library or executable, but in practice, projects prefer to split the compilation of sources into smaller, well-defined libraries. This is done both to localize scope and simplify dependency scanning, but also to simplify code maintenance. This means that building a project out of many libraries as we have done here is a typical situation.

To discuss the CMake structure we can proceed bottom-up from the individual CMakeLists.txt files defining each library, such as src/evolution/CMakeLists.txt ...