We are certainly interested in modernizing our CMake scripts and welcome contributions in that direction.

What you decided to do is a great undertaking. We will need to be very careful though:

• our CI pipelines neither test CMake scripts explicitly, nor package the library;
• there are numerous corner cases and platform-dependent conditions in the scripts.

We will need extensive manual testing to make sure we don't break anything on any platform. I would prefer if we split this modernization over a series of as small as possible PRs which are easy to review and test.

What minimum version of CMake do you want to support?

Currently we require 3.1, however we may raise this to 3.5 if needed. Our current baseline environment is Ubuntu 16.04 (which has 3.5) and we'd prefer to not require anything higher than that unless absolutely needed.

Thanks for your reply, sorry it took so long to get back to you.

So far there was only one feature I used that required CMake>=3.5, which I have now reverted. I also managed to build the tools.

I would prefer if we split this modernization over a series of as small as possible PRs which are easy to review and test.

I'm not entirely sure how this can be split up. I'm open to suggestions.

Let's go progressively. My first suggestion would be to go first for component specification for vtk in CMakeLists.txt. It's a very small change which might have unforeseen consequences. I also see you
added the comment

#TODO this may not be sufficient if OpenGL2 is available

I believe that to be the case in the majority of platforms these days.

I say we try that first and let it run through the CI, because right now you have no feedback whatsoever of what is building on osx and windows. It's a simple step but a necessary one.

Edit: This is just a proposal to kickstart the discussion with a meaningful suggestion.

This pull request has been automatically marked as stale because it hasn't had
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Come back whenever you have time. We look forward to your contribution.

This pull request has been automatically marked as stale because it hasn't had
any activity in the past 60 days. Commenting or adding a new commit to the
pull request will revert this.

Come back whenever you have time. We look forward to your contribution.

Marking this as stale due to 30 days of inactivity. Commenting or adding a new commit to the pull request will revert this.