CMake 3.5 Release Notes

Changes made since CMake 3.4 include the following.

New Features

GUI

  • The cmake-gui(1) gained options to control warnings about deprecated functionality.
  • The cmake-gui(1) learned an option to set the toolset to be used with VS IDE and Xcode generators, much like the existing -T option to cmake(1).
  • The cmake-gui(1) gained a Regular Expression Explorer which may be used to create and evaluate regular expressions in real-time. The explorer window is available via the Tools menu.

Command-Line

  • The -Wdev and -Wno-dev cmake(1) options now also enable and suppress the deprecated warnings output by default.
  • The suppression of developer warnings as errors can now be controlled with the new -Werror=dev and -Wno-error=dev cmake(1) options.
  • The cmake(1) -E command-line tools copy, copy_if_different, copy_directory, and make_directory learned to support multiple input files or directories.

Commands

Variables

Properties

  • The VS_GLOBAL_<variable> target property is now implemented for VS 2010 and above. Previously it worked only in VS 2008 and below.

Modules

  • The ExternalProject module learned a new GIT_REMOTE_NAME option to control the git clone --origin value.
  • The FindBoost module now provides imported targets such as Boost::boost and Boost::filesystem.
  • The FindFLEX module FLEX_TARGET macro learned a new DEFINES_FILE option to specify a custom output header to be generated.
  • The FindGTest module now provides imported targets.
  • The FindGTK2 module, when GTK2_USE_IMPORTED_TARGETS is enabled, now sets GTK2_LIBRARIES to contain the list of imported targets instead of the paths to the libraries. Moreover it now sets a new GTK2_TARGETS variable containing all the targets imported.
  • The FindOpenMP module learned to support Clang.
  • The FindOpenSSL module gained a new OPENSSL_MSVC_STATIC_RT option to search for libraries using the MSVC static runtime.
  • The FindPNG module now provides imported targets.
  • The FindTIFF module now provides imported targets.
  • A FindXalanC module was introduced to find the Apache Xalan-C++ XSL transform processing library.
  • The FindXercesC module now provides imported targets.

Platforms

  • Support was added for the ARM Compiler (arm.com) with compiler id ARMCC.
  • A new platform file for cross-compiling in the Cray Linux Environment to target compute nodes was added. See Cross Compiling for the Cray Linux Environment for usage details.
  • The Compile Features functionality is now aware of features supported by Clang compilers on Windows (MinGW).
  • When building for embedded Apple platforms like iOS CMake learned to build and install combined targets which contain both a device and a simulator build. This behavior can be enabled by setting the IOS_INSTALL_COMBINED target property.

CPack

Other

  • Warnings about deprecated functionality are now enabled by default. They may be suppressed with -Wno-deprecated or by setting the CMAKE_WARN_DEPRECATED variable to false.

Deprecated and Removed Features

  • The cmake(1) -E time command now properly passes arguments with spaces or special characters through to the child process. This may break scripts that worked around the bug with their own extra quoting or escaping.
  • The Xcode generator was fixed to escape backslashes in strings consistently with other generators. Projects that previously worked around the inconsistecy with an extra level of backslashes conditioned on the Xcode generator must be updated to remove the workaround for CMake 3.5 and greater.

Other Changes

  • The Visual Studio 14 2015 generator learned to map the /debug:fastlink linker flag to the .vcxproj file property.
  • The FindGTK2 module now configures the GTK2::sigc++ imported target to enable c++11 on its dependents when using sigc++ 2.5.1 or higher.
  • The precompiled Windows binary provided on cmake.org is now a .msi package instead of an installer executable. One may need to manually uninstall CMake versions lower than 3.5 before installing the new package.