added BUILD_TESTS cmake option

[mristin]

No description provided.

[mavam]

Making the unit tests optional is a valuable addition. 👍

However, the PR silently changes a critical piece of the build infrastructure. So far we provided a thin shell script to facilitate the build process. If you find it more valuable to change the current script, then this should be a separate PR.

What's missing for this PR to go through is enhancing the configure script with an option along the lines of --no-unit-tests and reverting the change in the README. I'm not against ditching the script, but I think we need to discuss it first. 🙂

[mristin]

Hi @mavam
Sorry, it slipped my attention that there is a configure script. I would really suggest to remove the script (I didn't even notice that it exists ;)). I'm used to either configure && make && make install workflow or cmake ... && make && make install, but not a hybrid approach. As far as I can see, you set only some flags in configure which you could just as well set when invoking cmake (and this would also be the expected way of configuring for me)?

Since today so many people started using conan, it makes only sense to me to keep CMakeLists.txt, delete configure and package the whole repo for conan once we are satisfied with the changes (e.g., once the serialization is in). That would be the least surprise to me as the user.