I'm looking to rework my Angelscript utility code to separate out the Angelscript library into its own repository. I figured that somebody else probably did it before, and so i searched for and found several repositories on Github containing old mirrors of the SDK, some with additional changes like CMake support. CMake support is provided in sdk/angelscript/projects/cmake, although it uses outdated syntax to support older versions of CMake.
At least one of these (https://github.com/svn2github/angelscript) was set up to automatically mirror the commits, but it seems that none of these repositories are still actively mirroring the commits.
So i'm wondering if there are any plans to set this up as part of the SVN repository's commit handling. Basically, a Github repository automatically receives commits as the SVN repository does, with tags pushed for version releases. It seems that commits that update version numbers always follow the same format: "Releasing major.minor.patch", so a script could detect this and add a tag to it.
It would make using Angelscript in projects easier and make the other mirrors obsolete (and prevent the creation of even more, as i almost did this myself), so it's a win-win for everybody.
On the subject of the CMake project file: there is no setup for install targets, which would usually install the library and the header file somewhere to be used. I'd suggest installing to <target>/angelscript_major_minor_patch, optionally installing shared libraries in lib/shared and static libraries in lib/static, with a FindXXX.cmake file to locate it automatically based on this. This is how Boost does it (specifically https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/blob/master/Modules/FindBoost.cmake#L1222), and lets you have multiple versions installed side by side.
Of course, it is ultimately up to the end user so having it detect the version some other way (like parsing angelscript.h for ANGELSCRIPT_VERSION_STRING) might be better. Boost searches for config.hpp in paths that adhere to the version number approach i mentioned above: https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/blob/master/Modules/FindBoost.cmake#L1240
Here's Boost's FindBoost file: https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/blob/master/Modules/FindBoost.cmake
And here's the documentation for it: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/module/FindBoost.html
Ideally with this done, getting started with Angelscript would involve cloning the repository, setting it up with the desired compile settings (e.g. AS_NO_EXCEPTIONS, which should be possible using a CMake variable like CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS), installing it and then using it in your own projects by calling:
#Find this exact version of Angelscript, error if not found
find_package( Angelscript 2.32.0 EXACT REQUIRED )
target_link_libraries( my_executable
optimized Angelscript::Angelscript
debug Angelscript::Angelscriptd
)
And then using an imported target to link with it automatically. This target could have angelscript.h specified by adding an interface_include_directories property, making it even easier. I'm assuming that a debug version would be provided as a separate target here.
Having each release push a tag would make it easy to get the version you want, and you can switch to WIP by pulling the latest commit. Once set up it should be as simple as recompiling and executing the install target to bring your projects up to date.
With such a repository set up on Github, it may be possible to have additional hooks triggered there to do other things, but i assume this requires write access to the repository to set up. It could allow for automatic builds to test for breaking changes or compiler/platform specific issues as well.
