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Modify behavior of `blt_list_append` ?

Open kennyweiss opened this issue 1 year ago • 0 comments

The Axom project recently fixed a bug related to ENV variables that were not correctly setup -- https://github.com/LLNL/axom/pull/1168

It revealed that blt_list_append generates a FATAL_ERROR when attempting to append empty strings to a list. https://github.com/LLNL/blt/blob/d57f7995ff8299e4612e74ec94e35eacde93cf40/cmake/BLTInstallableMacros.cmake#L40-L42

Is this the desired behavior? Or would it be better if appending an empty string to a list was a no-op?

Ben Liu suggested some additional options:

  • blt_list_append should emit a warning in this case since this is often unexpected behavior
  • blt_list_append should take an (optional) additional parameter regarding how to treat this case, e.g. FATAL_ERROR, warning or no-op. If we pursue this option, we'd also need to decide on the default behavior.

@white238 noted that CMake's (list(APPEND <empty string>) is a no-op

kennyweiss avatar Aug 30 '23 18:08 kennyweiss