Neil Hodgson wrote:
cmake does not produce relative paths in its generated make and project files. There is an option CMAKE_USE_RELATIVE_PATHS which appears to do this but the documentation says:
"""This option does not work for more complicated projects, and relative paths are used when possible. In general, it is not possible to move CMake generated makefiles to a different location regardless of the value of this variable."""
This means that generated Visual Studio project files will not work for other people unless a particular absolute build location is specified for everyone which will not suit most. Each person that wants to build Python will have to run cmake before starting Visual Studio thus increasing the prerequisites.
This is true. CMake does not generate stand alone transferable projects. CMake must be installed on the machine where the compilation is done. CMake will automatically re-run if any of the inputs are changed, and have visual studio re-load the project, and CMake can be used for simple cross platform commands like file copy and and other operations so that the build files do not depend on shell commands or anything system specific. -Bill