Release Notes

Details of changes can be found in the changelog, but this file will contain some high level notes and highlights from each release.

v0.6 series

v0.6.13

This is a hotfix on v0.6.12. The python distribution package was missing some modules.

v0.6.12

This release includes mostly internal housekeeping. The code organization was overhauled to better represent the division between different components. The cmake_format package has been replaced by cmakelang, with format now a subpackage. All the first class tools are now subpackages of cmakelang. For now, I’ll leave the github repository at cmake_format but there’s a good chance I’ll move it to cmakelang in the future. Big refactors like this have a tendency to expose gaps in coverage so please report any breakages you observe.

In addition, the configuration now includes options for using tab characters in listfiles (though, I’m not sure who in the right mind would choose to do so). If enabled, the formatter will translate indentations from spaces to tabs, and the linter will inforce a consistent tab policy.

This release also includes a couple of minor bug fixes. See the release notes for more details.

v0.6.11

This release adds argcomplete handling to enable automatic shell completion to cmake-format and cmake-lint. argcomplete is not an installation dependency so if you wish to enable completion please install argcomplete (e.g. via pip) and then activate it (see the documentation for argcomplete).

The visual studio code extension now supports variable substitution for things like ${workspaceRoot} and ${workspaceFolder} in the args and cwd configuration options.

There is a new configuration option to disable formatting. This can be specified in a config file to conveniently no-op formatting within a subdirectory (such as third-party source code) of a project.

v0.6.10

This release fixes a number of issues with cmake-lint and activates cmake-lint as part of the lint build step in CI for this project and the upstream repository. There is still a lot of work to do on cmake-lint but at this point it is in a less experimental state and I am sufficiently confident in it enough to suggest that you start using it. Feel free to report any issues you encounter with it.

This release also includes some cleanup work under the hood of cmake-format and the parsing code. Most notably, the command specifications for all of the cmake functions and macros defined in standard modules have been generated using genparsers and are now included by default. I have not audited all of them so the detected specifications are probably not all correct. Please let me know if you observe any problems with them.

v0.6.9

The parser now performs token look-ahead when parsing a comment within a statement. This allows it to determine whether a comment belongs to the current semantic node or one higher up in the tree (previously it would assign all comments to the most recent semantic node). This should prevent some unusual indentation of comments within deep statements.

Some cmake-lint crashes have been fixed and the test coverage has increased significantly. There are still some outstanding issues but it should crash less frequently and with more helpful information.

Detailed documentation for configuration options is now generated automatically, including default value, command line syntax, and example configuration file entry.

v0.6.8

There is now an embeded a database of known variables and properties. cmake-lint uses this database to implement checks on assignment/use of variables that are likely to be typos of a builtin variable name. There are also two new configuration options vartags and proptags that can be used to affect how the parser and formatter treat certain variables and properties.

Line comments within a statement are now consumed the same as line comments at block-scope. This means that your multiline mid-statement comments will be reflowed whereas they would previously have been left alone.

The CI Build has gotten a little more complicated. Generated documentation sources are no longer committed to the repository. Instead, they are pushed to a separate staging repository from which the read-the-docs pages are built.

v0.6.7

With this release, the specification format for custom commands has been updated to enable a number of new features. Positional argument groups now support “tags” which can be used to influence the formatting for some special cases. The format now also supports multiple positional argument groups. Lastly, there is a new experimental tool cmake-genparsers which can automatically generate parser specifications from your custom commands that use the standard cmake_parse_arguments.

There is a new configuration option max_rows_cmdline which applies only to shell commands and determines when a shell command should nest under it’s keyword argument.

v0.6.6

The configuration datastructures have been overhauled and configuration options are now separated into different groupings based on which part of the processing pipeline they are relevent to. Legacy configuration files (without sections) are still supported, though they may be deprecated in the future. cmake-format can update your configuration file for you with the following command:

There is a new configuration option explicit_trailing_pattern which can be used to define a particular character sequence used by comments that are explicitly matched as trailing comments of an argument or statement. See the docs for more information.

Configuration files can now include additional configuration files. This might help keep configurations organized if you are maintaining a database of custom command definitions.

v0.6.5

This is largely a maintenance release, implementing explicit parse logic for all cmake commands that don’t already have parsers. One additional configuration option is added allowing cmake-lint to globally ignore specific lint ids.

v0.6.4

This release includes implementations for many more lint checkers. Under the hood there was a pretty significant refactor of the parser, though none of the parse logic has changed. The refactor was primarily to split up the very large parser module, and to make it easier to access qualifiers of the parse tree during lint checks.

You can see a running list of all the implemented checkers at the docs.

v0.6.3

This release finally includes some progress on a long-standing goal: a cmake-linter built on the same foundation as the formatter. As of this release The cmake-format python package now comes with both the cmake-format and cmake-lint programs. The linter is still in a relatively early state and lacks many features, but should continue to grow with the formatter in future releases.

Along with the new linter, this release also includes some reorganization of the documentation in order to more clearly separate information about the different programs that are distributed from this repository.

v0.6.2

This is a maintenance release. Some additional command parsers have moved out of the standard parse model improving the parse of these commands. This release also includes some groundwork scripts to parse the usage strings in the cmake help text. Additionally:

  • --in-place will preserve file mode
  • The new --check command line option will not format the file, but exit with non-zero status if any changes would be made
  • The new --require-valid-layout option will exit with non-zero status if an admissible layout is not found.

v0.6.1

This is primarily a documentation update. Some of the testing infrastructure has changed but no user-facing code has been modified.

v0.6.0

This release includes a significant refactor of the formatting logic. Details of the new algorithm are described in the documentation. As a result of the algorithm changes, some config options have changed too. The following config options are removed:

  • max_subargs_per_line (see max_pargs_hwrap)
  • nest_threshold (see min_prefix_chars)
  • algorithm_order (see layout_passes)

And the following config options have been added:

  • max_subgroups_hwrap
  • max_pargs_hwrap
  • dangle_align
  • min_prefix_chars
  • max_prefix_chars
  • max_lines_hwrap
  • layout_passes
  • enable_sort

Also as a result of the algorithm changes, the default layout has changed. By default, cmake-format will now prefer to nest long lists rather than aligning them to the opening parenthesis of a statement. Also, due to the new configuration options, the output of cmake-format is likely to be different with your current configs.

Additionally, cmake-format will now tend to prefer a normal “horizontal” wrap for relatively long lists of positional arguments (e.g. source files in add_library) whereas it would previously prefer a vertical layout (one-entry per line). This is a consequence of an ambiguity between which positional arguments should be vertical versus which should be wrapped. Two planned features (layout tags and positional semantics) should help to provide enough control to get the layout you want in these lists.

I acknowledge that it is not ideal for formatting to change between releases but this is an unfortunate inevitability at this stage of development. The changes in this release elminate a number of inconsistencies and also adds the groundwork for future planned features and options. Hopefully we are getting close to a stable state and a 1.0 release.

v0.5 series

v0.5.5

This is a maintenance release fixing a few minor bugs and enhancements. One new feature is that the --config command line option now accepts a list of config files, which should allow for including multiple databases of command specifications —— v0.5.4 ——

This is a maintenance release fixing a couple of bugs and adding some missing documentation. One notable feature added is that, during in-place formatting, if the file content is unchanged cmake-format will no-longer write the file.

v0.5.3

This hotfix release fixes a bug that would crash cmake-format if no configuration file was present. It also includes some small under-the-hood changes in preparation for an overhaul of the formatting logic.

v0.5.2

This release fixes a few bugs and does some internal prep work for upcoming format algorithm changes. The documentation on the format algorithm is a little ahead of the code state in this release. Also, the documentation theme has changed to something based on read-the-docs (I hope you like it).

  • Add missing forms of add_library() and add_executable()
  • --autosort now defaults to False (it can be somewhat suprising) and it doesn’t always get it right.
  • Configuration options in --help and in the example configurations from --dump-config are now split into hopefully meaningful sections.
  • cmake-format no longer tries to infer “keywords” or “flags” from COMMAND strings. This matching wasn’t good enough as there is way too much variance in how programs design their command line options.

v0.5.1

The 0.5.0 release involved some pretty big changes to the parsing engine and introduced a new format algorithm. These two things combined unfortunately lead to a lot of new bugs. The full battery of pre-release tests wasn’t run and so a lot of those issues popped up after release. Hopefully most of those are squashed in this release.

  • Fixed lots of bugs introduced in 0.5.0
  • cmake-format has a channel on discord now. Come chat about it at https://discord.gg/NgjwyPy

v0.5.0

  • Overhauled the parser logic enabling arbitrary implementations of statement parsers. The generic statement parser is now implemented by the standard_parse function (or the StandardParser functor, which is used to load legacy additional_commands).

  • New custom parser logic for deep cmake statements such as:

    • install
    • file
    • ExternalProject_XXX
    • FetchContent_XXX

  • cmake-format can now sort your argument lists for you (such as lists of files). This enabled with the autosort config option. Some argument lists are inherently sortable (e.g. the list of sources supplied to add_library or add_executable). Other commands (e.g. set() which cannot be inferred sortable can be explicitly tagged using a comment at the beginning of the list. See the README for more information.

  • A consequence of the above is that the parse tree for set() has changed, and so it’s default formatting in many cases has also changed. You can restore the old behavior by adding the following to your config:

    additional_commands = {
  "set": {
    "flags": ["FORCE", "PARENT_SCOPE"],
    "kwargs": {
      "CACHE": "*"
    }
  }
}

  • The default command case has changed from lower to canonical (which is a new option). In most cases this is the same as lower but for some standard, non-builtin commands the canonical spelling is CamelCase (i.e. ExternalProject_Add).

  • There is a new cmake-annotate program distributed with the package. It can generate semantic HTML renderings of your listfiles (see the documentation for details).

v0.4 series

v0.4.5

  • Add travis CI configuration for public github repo

v0.4.4

  • Add the ability to dump out markup parse lists for debugging.
  • Add the ability to dump out a semantic HTML markup of a listfile, allowing for easy server-side semantic highlighting of documentation pages. See cmake-annotate.

v0.4.2

  • Added the brand new Visual Studio Code extension, which can be found in the vscode marketplace! You can now use cmake-format to “Format Document” in vscode.
  • Some new configuration options to allow user-specified literal fences and rulers in comment markup.
  • New configuration options to preserve literal comment blocks at the start of your listfiles (intended for copyright statements), as well as to disable comment reflow alltogether.
  • Fixed some bugs and improved some error messages

Enjoy!