Postmodern CMake was an experiment in adopting a Blaze-derived pattern for defining CMake targets. We thought it was a pretty successful first effort.

It's also a joke. Because "Modern CMake" was picking up some well deserved steam when we were authoring this. And I thought a literary pun would make for a good library name. (And jokes are always funnier explained.)

Using the library

The short of it is,

1. include(postmodern_cmake) as a module (modifying CMAKE_MODULE_PATH as necessary) in your CMakeLists.txt file.
   Bonus points if you also include(postmodern_cmake.test).
2. Author a set of targets.cmake files. Basically every directory that contains compilable code should contain a targets.cmake.
3. Define one or more target per targets.cmake file with the pm_autotarget (or pm_target) function.
4. Add pm_parse_targets to your CMakeLists.txt to Find and parse the targets.cmake file set. This function will recursively search the given directory for targets.cmake files, and include each of them as a means to load the defined targets into the current project.

If you'd like to start digging into the guts of this library, you should start with pm_autotargets.cmake first, then pm_parse_arguments.cmake. It flows from there. As much as a CMake library "flows," anyway.

For an example of this library in action, take a look at a targets.cmake from our nonstd library.

Did you say, include(postmodern_cmake.test)?

Yep. This library comes with tests. Implemented in CMake, no less.

To see those in action,

• cd test_project
• cmake .
• Note the -- Running Postmodern ... suite log lines

Or include(postmodern_cmake.test) in your own CMakeLists.txt file and burn ~.3 seconds running the tests as part of your own generation phase.

postmodern_cmake.test.cmake is just a runner so to see how the tests work, I'd recommend starting with pm_fail.test.cmake, and then whatever set of unit tests look interesting.