Editing Software Development Platforms (section)

==Quick CMake Tutorial==

A lot of software that we use uses cmake as a build system.  Rather than repeat generic instructions over and over, I will present generic usage here.

===Creating a build directory===

CMake can build the software into any directory.  Usually the most sensible thing to do is to create a build directory in the source tree and run cmake from there.

 cd some_project_source
 mkdir build
 cd build

Now you need to generate a configuration to build.  There are two standard options: a command line interface and a graphical client.

===Configuration with ccmake===

Start it with

 ccmake ..

Hit C for configure.  A table of variables will appear alter them as described for the particular project.  Some variables are marked as Advanced and will only be visible after you hit T for toggle advanced.  Keep hitting C, and modifying variables as required, until the Generate options appears.  Then hit G for generate and ccmake will exit.

===Configuration with the CMake Graphical Client===

Start it by double-clicking on the icon, or with the command

 cmake-gui

Need to finish this...

===Building===

Once you've generated the configuration, you can just build the project like this:

 make

If it's a big project, you may want add -j 8 to that.  That will use 8 parallel threads for compilation.

To install the software, you now run

 sudo make install