FAQ
===


Should I include and track also files generated by Autocmake in my repository?
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Yes, you probably want to do that. Autocmake generates a number of files which
in principle could be generated at configure- or build-time.  However, you
probably do not want the users of your code to run any Autocmake scripts like
``update.py`` to generate the files they need to build the project. They will
run ``setup.py`` directly and expect everything to just work (TM).


The update.py script is overwriting my CMakeLists.txt and setup.py, isn't this bad?
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It's not as bad as it first looks. It's a feature. Normally ``CMakeLists.txt``
and ``setup.py`` should not contain any explicit customization and therefore should not
contain anything that could not be regenerated. In any case you should use
version control so that you can inspect and compare changes introduced to
``CMakeLists.txt`` and ``setup.py`` and possibly revert them. See also the next
remark.


But I need to manually edit and customize CMakeLists.txt and setup.py every time I run update.py!?
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You typically never need to manually edit and customize ``CMakeLists.txt`` and
``setup.py`` directly. You can introduce customizations in ``autocmake.cfg``
which get assembled into the front-end scripts.


Where is a good place to list my sources and targets?
-----------------------------------------------------

As mentioned above ``CMakeLists.txt`` is not a good place because this file is generated
from ``autocmake.cfg`` and your modifications would become overwritten at some point.
A good solution for this is to list your sources and targets in ``src/CMakeLists.txt``
and include the latter in ``autocmake.cfg`` using::

  [src]
  source: https://github.com/scisoft/autocmake/raw/master/modules/src.cmake

If you really don't like to do it this way, you can describe your sources and
targets in a custom module in a local file and include it like this::

  [my_sources]
  source: custom/my_sources.cmake