[Minor feature request] Manifest for download dependencies about cpm.cmake HOT 3 OPEN

I do see the value in having a cleaner project structure like that, though the issue I see is that this declarative approach is quite contrary to the imperative way that CMake works. So to implement this "properly" would require the package manager to work on a higher level and invoke CMake itself, or we can restrict the manifest to the dependencies only. Though in the latter case you could already just create a dependencies.cmake file which is imported from the main CMakeLists.txt, that only adds the dependencies. I'll have to think about this a bit.

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Hey thanks for the suggestion! To be clear, with a manifest, do you mean something like a JSON that lists the first-level dependencies of the project, say similar to npm or vcpkg packages?

from cpm.cmake.

Yes @TheLartians! I don't know if there is any road map or this project, but including it definitely can help a lot.

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