Support for manually configured variants

[chrish42]

The CMake Tools design for variants is overall very nice. However, for the project I'm working on (Apache Arrow), it's kind of impractical. Arrow has a lot of optional components that can be configured at build time. Since the project doesn't use VS Code as a standard, I really don't want to go through the work of setting up variants for all that, and so that hampers my ability to use CMake Tools with that project.

If there was a way to associate a variant name (e.g. "debug") either with a specific CMake invocation, or an existing CMake output directory, that would allow me to define a couple variants ("debug", "release") that have all the right flags for my work, and then use only those. That would be a lot less work to use CMake Tools with a project with many options.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is now marked as 'stale-old' due to there being no activity on it for the past 720 days. Unless the 'stale-old' label is removed or the issue is commented on, this will be remain open for at least 14 days and then it may be closed. If you would like to make this issue exempt from getting stale, please add the 'stale-exempt' label.

[chrish42]

Still very relevant when using VS Code with big complex CMake projects that are not managed upstream via VS Code.

[gcampbell-msft]

@chrish42 Is it possible that CMakePresets.json would allow you to do what you're searching for?