It looks like you're one of the people very involved with hunter. This also looks very interesting, since it's implemented as a set of cmake scripts, which I can just add to my module path... What's the advantage of using hunter vs ExternalProject?
I'll try to dig through the documentation later this weekend.
Since my work project is spread across so many repos, and is so complicated and my OSS time is so limited, even hacking together a prototype can be a decent time investment, so I'd appreciate any high level feature differences you can think of.
Yes! I started using it ~8 months ago and fell in love with its simplicity. Hunter aims to be a full package manager, so it strives to build a project and all of its depedendencies recursively. This is fundamentally different than just adding one external project and ignoring the depedencies (what ExternalProject_Add does). The downside is this forces Hunter to maintain many forks of original repos just to keep track of the dependency information. Meanwhile, Hunter basically guarantees rebuilds only when necessary and caches all library builds locally in the ~/.hunter directory. It really really simplifies the whole dependency management of a CMake project.
I'll try to dig through the documentation later this weekend.
Since my work project is spread across so many repos, and is so complicated and my OSS time is so limited, even hacking together a prototype can be a decent time investment, so I'd appreciate any high level feature differences you can think of.